It was two weeks before her 16th birthday last December. Days before the start of competition for the dance team she cherished.
Aleta Frerichs of Lafayette came down awkwardly during a modified headspring at dance practice. She heard the pop in her knee and felt something shift.
“When I landed, I knew something was wrong.”
Still, she tried to shake it off and continue dancing.
“They were five days away from their first dance competition of the season, so she was locked in and wanted to be there for her team,” Deanna Wise-Frerichs said of her daughter.
But it wasn’t to be.
Aleta went to her pediatrician the next day, and tests confirmed she had torn her ACL. The physician recommended she go to the pediatric sports medicine team at Riley Children’s Health for further evaluation and treatment.
The sports medicine clinic at Riley at IU Health North Hospital is an hour away from their Lafayette home, but they didn’t think twice about making the trip, Wise-Frerichs said. It helped that both Aleta and her sister had some experience with Riley previously.
There, they met orthopedic surgeon Dr. Gunnar Tysklind, who completed medical school at Indiana University School of Medicine, followed by orthopedic residency at Akron General Hospital (now part of the Cleveland Clinic) and fellowship training in pediatric sports medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. He has been with Riley for nearly five years.
An athlete himself in high school and college, Dr. Tysklind still plays soccer recreationally, so his interest in sports medicine comes naturally.
When he first saw Aleta a few days after her injury, he sensed how overwhelming it was for her.
“There is a lot going through these young patients’ minds,” he said. “Will I dance again? How is school going to go? How am I going to sleep?”
The big question – will I dance again – weighed heavily on both mom and daughter’s minds.
“I knew I wouldn’t be able to dance that Saturday for the competition, but I still hoped for at least part of the rest of the season,” Aleta said.
Instead, she missed it all. She underwent ACL surgery at IU North in mid-January and returned to see Dr. Tysklind and medical resident Dr. Jon-Luc Poirier for a three-month checkup last week.
The first thing Dr. Tysklind noticed was that her smile was back.
“I’m feeling much better, hopeful,” she said.
The soft-spoken teen, a straight-A student who wants to study aeronautical engineering at Purdue University, is now walking without assistance. Her knee has the appropriate range of motion, and she is regaining her strength, thanks to regular physical therapy.
She won’t be cleared to do any serious dance moves that require jumping or spinning for several months, but practicing simple choreography and working with a personal trainer will be OK, Dr. Tysklind told her.
“The stuff I get worried about is the cutting, pivoting and hopping around with weights,” he said. “We’re not quite ready for that, but any of your foot-planted activities are good.”
That’s a step in the right direction for Aleta, who has been dancing since she was 5 years old.
“I can’t remember a life without dance,” said the high school sophomore who mostly performs jazz and hip-hop. “It was really hard to have one of the most important parts of my life just gone.”
But with the help of friends and her family, she has pushed through the hard parts and now wants to help other young people who are struggling with a similar challenge.
“I want to let them know it will get better,” she said. “It just takes time.”
She has been inspired by other people’s stories of overcoming injuries, especially on TikTok, her mom said.
“To be an athlete like she is and to have this injury take out a year of her high school dance career, there’s definitely been some grieving,” Wise-Frerichs said. “But she’s been encouraged by dancers who have documented their recovery.”
And while Aleta is eager to rejoin her team as they begin practicing for the next season, she knows she can’t push it and risk a repeat injury. For now, Dr. Tysklind has given her the green light to ramp up her physical therapy without taking her eye off her goal – to be completely healed before she takes the floor in competition again in the fall.
She will return for a follow-up visit in three months, at which time she will be fitted for an ACL brace, then she will be scheduled for an MRI about two months after that, as well as return-to-sport testing, before she can be cleared to fully dance again.
It can’t come soon enough for Aleta, who has maintained her connection to dance by cheering on her team and continuing to teach younger kids at the local YWCA where she had her first lesson as a child.
She hopes to join the Purdue Golduster Dance Team someday, performing alongside her sister who is in the school’s marching band.
Aleta also plays saxophone and piano and enjoys painting and gardening, but dancing is her passion, so she intends to follow the healing regimen set out by the Riley sports medicine team to give her the best opportunity for success in the future.
She is the kind of motivated patient Dr. Tysklind likes to see because she is working hard to heal.
“Therapy is rough,” he said. “It’s a lot of work.”
The flip side is that sometimes these patients want to do more before they should, “so you have to reel them back in,” he said. “The knee might be feeling good, but that doesn’t mean you can push the limits.”
It can be tricky to assess when a patient is ready to come back to their sport, he acknowledged, but research has shown that about nine months is appropriate.
“We test it at six months and nine months to see how the knee is performing,” he said, noting that the first two years after an ACL tear is the riskiest period for reinjury. And young females are especially at risk for ACL injury.
Dr. Tysklind, who is supported by another pediatric orthopedic physician, a resident and a sports psychologist at IU North, said while Riley Hospital is well-known for its excellence in caring for the sickest of the sick, the pediatric sports medicine program is the only one in the state exclusively focused on children and teens.
“Here, we have everything they need.”