I Spent My Teenage Years in a Back Brace. Here’s What It Taught Me
How scoliosis shaped the way I saw my body and my future.
My mother used to bend me over and tell me to touch my toes. This was our monthly ritual, done before bed since I turned 8.
At first I thought it was a game, and would stretch my fingers eagerly toward the ground, laughing. A few years later I realized she was checking my spine, making sure it wasn’t growing on a crooked path that mimicked the curl of a snake.
I was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis — a curved spine — when I was 13. My mother, having scoliosis herself, knew the condition can be genetic. She noticed the deformity of my back and quickly brought me to a specialist.
I didn’t know what scoliosis was at that time. My only point of reference was the scar that ran up the line of my mother’s spine, dividing her back into two equal halves, as if slicing an orange.
The scar was a reminder of her surgery, a posterior fusion that grafted bone along her back to correct her curve. Luckily, mine wasn’t yet at a large enough degree to consider surgery, or to cause me harm in any way.
The doctor suggested I wear a back brace to help my spine grow straight during puberty. “Two years after your first menstrual period is when you stop growing,” he said. “You’ll wear the brace every day until then.”
Most girls dread getting their periods, knowing it is the start of cramps, mood swings and unexplainable cravings for chocolate-covered anything, but I welcomed mine. Anything to rid myself of the humiliating plastic shell strapped tightly to my torso, making up for a job my spine couldn’t do.
An orthopedic doctor at the Rehabilitation Centre for Children equipped me with my armour. I waited anxiously in his office with my mother, surrounded by displays of colourful moulds made for legs, arms and hands. It was disturbing to see these braces for kids with missing limbs, and I tried then to stop feeling sorry for myself.
The doctor measured my waist and the length of my upper body. The cool metal of the tape made me jump as he pressed it firmly against my stomach. After taking my measurements, he moulded the brace.
The style, he said, was called a Boston brace. To 13-year-old me, it looked like a straitjacket. Cloudy-white plastic formed the shape of a torso, like a mannequin with its head, legs and arms chopped off. Three thick straps with metal fasteners were bolted to the back to keep me inside.
I would learn to tighten the straps on my own soon, he told me. But for now he yanked them together, clasping them so tightly that I struggled with each breath.
For me, Grade 8 will always carry the memory of plain white cotton undershirts from Wal-Mart, the ones that come in packs of four and feel itchy and unyielding against the body. Every day, I wore one of these undershirts beneath my brace to keep it from pinching my skin.
By the end of it all, I must have owned 50 of them. They took up an entire drawer, a crumpled, sweaty pile of white cotton like snow.
Grade 8, already an awkward time, was even more difficult to navigate in a large, bulky back brace. The hard plastic dug into my ribs and beneath my back bones. The straps left sore red marks across my back, and the area between the undershirt and the brace was always hot and sweaty.
Naturally, I didn’t want to show up to my school’s winter dance strapped into it. I tried to slip out of my house that evening sans brace, but my parents stopped me at the door.
“This thing is ruining my life!” I protested dramatically. But eventually, after I threatened to stay locked in my room until my hair turned grey, they let me go braceless while I slow-danced under coffee-filter snowflakes with a boy named Braden.
I unfastened my brace for the last time the summer before Grade 10. One June morning, the doctor determined I was through with my growth spurt and declared me free from my plastic prison. No bells sounded, no party was thrown and my life did not instantly change. I simply went home, took off my brace for my evening bath and never put it back on. The drawer of crumpled undershirts remained quietly closed.
Now, I find myself forgetting that a brace ever held me up. The plastic casing sits on the top shelf of my closet, the straps covered in a thick layer of dust.
Because I never had surgery, my curve is still visible. I will never be a straight-backed ballerina or a tall, poised runway model. One of my hips is higher than the other, and when I wear tight clothes my hunched back is prominent.
But I survived the years when it felt like my life was ending. I was young and stupid, I now know, because so much of life happens beyond Grade 8.
Some day, when I welcome my daughter into the world and watch her crawl and walk and run, I will attempt to explain to her the grand scheme of life.
And once a month, before bed, I will ask her to bend over and touch her toes. She will laugh and think it’s a game, and when I see her spine start to twist itself in growth I will sit with her in the waiting rooms of specialists.
And when she tries to sneak out of the house, braceless, for her Grade 8 winter dance, I will turn a blind eye and watch her go.
