Plastered, or I Was A Teen-Age Mummy

Today I started an email to a friend with scoliosis whose young daughter has developed scoliosis as well. But it turned into a memoir more suited to a weblog, so I've decided to post it here:


I can't recall offhand how soon B _____ (and you) go in for her x-rays and evaluation, but I am certainly thinking about you both and hoping for the best. This brings back the anxiety of my own early adolescence, ages 12 and 13, when they were watching me for a year, giving me exercises (chin-ups) I couldn't do which theoretically might help, and ultimately wrapping me up in a humongous plaster Risser jacket - thank God they no longer subject kids to those casts. (Are you old enough to have worn a Risser yourself? I can't recall at the moment.) My first-ever orthopod, a specialist near the Virginia Army post where my father was stationed at that time, told us that this this torture device with its incorporated traction was invented by a person of unique genius, a Dr. Joseph Risser in California. Knowing Dad was soon to retire from the military, this doctor opined, with a nod in my direction, "You know, Colonel, for her sake you might want to consider settling in California. California is the Mecca of Scoliotics."

I got my first-ever Risser jacket on a rack-resembling Risser table in a bleak Richmond hospital for "crippled children." I refused to have surgery there, and the grownups in my life continued to pressure me but did not insist, When I had been plastered for six months, my father got me an appointment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. The Army specialists handed me an ultimatum: "Gotta operate, no doubt about it, save your heart and lungs, keep you out of a wheel chair -- check back in two weeks for your spinal fusion."

The night before the surgery, newly installed in a hospital bed, I wanted only to split. I told my mother I could not go through with it. I could not let those men in scrub suits open my back and saw up my vertebrae and solder everything back together with a paste made of ground-up bone excised from my pelvis. My mother said, "Well, you are thirteen years old. We can't make you. It has to be your choice.(Such permissiveness was not characteristic of my parents except with respect to my scoliosis. After all, who wants to face the repercussions of a possible surgical complication after consenting to protracted carpentry in the area of a child's spinal cord?) My mother added, somewhat surprisingly (since she was a fundamentalist preacher's daughter with a doctorate in Classics from Cornell and a private but longstanding allergy to religion), "Why don't we pray about it?" I said o.k., although I'll bet that was the only time after age 5 I would have been caught dead saying prayers with my mother.

After visiting hours ended and my mother departed, I prayed again in my own head for a while, expecting nothing. All of a sudden, a sense of vast, ineffable peace settled over me, enveloping me in warmth and a profound sense of absolute safety. I marveled, "So this is the presence of God they have been talking about all these years! So the stuff they said about that in Sunday school is true after all . . . so God is true after all." I understood that I was being asked to go through with the surgery. A few hours later, when they came with the gurney, I did not protest.

That first fusion -- not the one that messed me up; that was the second fusion, with instrumentation, at age 38 -- was a pretty rugged experience. Afterwards, I was in horrible pain for days. I know things are much better and easier for kids these days. And if, God help us, B______ does need surgery, she will probably have one of those short, removable braces I sometimes had as an adult (otherwise, I wore no brace of any kind following adult fusion). That short job, the so-called TLSO, is so much more comfortable and endurable than those antiquated casts -- removable for a shower, doesn't require the poor kid to wear huge, odd clothes. I remember that my mother, bless her heart -- we had a terrible, stormy, conflicted relationship, but she did a few things right -- sewed me a whole wardrobe of muu-muus in the fabrics of my choice, including one very pretty, dressy one I wore when I actually went to the eighth grade dance with my good friend Charlie. But the need to wear a muu muu at all -- aughhhh! Some time I will have to ask people online what they wore over that humongous cast. Besides a muu-muu, I'm not sure what you could have worn except a tent.

At a later stage of my career in plaster, when I was 14, I made my dad take a picture of me in my last cast. By that time, I'd been switched to a "Minerva jacket," which incorporated a kind of helmet that went all around my face. The picture was taken shortly after church on Sunday, outside our house, and I was wearing a size 20 Sunday suit. I think I wanted the picture as evidence that I had been there and done that -- I had withstood something hard that not all kids are asked to deal with, and I had done so with a modicum of panache or bravura (along some early-1960s teenage bad taste, e.g., in Sunday purses). I am fairly sure I would have been wearing a jaunty Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat that Sunday, except it would never have fit over the plaster helmet encircling my brow. I'd been in bed for six months in a longer Risser jacket and had spent hours lying on my front -- a couple feet out over the side of the bed, supported by the plaster around my chest, with my younger brother's child-size card-table under my face at just the right height for reading and writing. This put enough pressure on the chin-piece that my upper front teeth began to stick out. The spine doctors sent me to get a retainer, then accepted the prosthodontist's decree: Switch her to a cast without chin traction so as not to worsen her malocclusion. Hence, the lovely Minerva.

The day they created my first Minerva -- a day everyone was admittedly somewhat distracted, waiting to learn how Soviet Premier Khruschev would respond to President Kennedy's imposition of a naval quarantine on Cuba -- the erstwhile plaster-room crew at Walter Reed was pleased with their final product. Relieved to have the cast change over with, I reached for the pair of thick spectacles I wore at all almost all times. But my glasses would not go back on my face -- the plaster Minerva helmet left no room for the ear-pieces. Following some short bursts of moderate cussing, the techs and the supervising resident decided to cut ear-sized openings on each side of my head and insert flat but narrow metal strips vertically, bridging the opening and holding the helmet together while allowing access to my ears. I was able to push the earpieces into place by routing them under the respective new metal girders. In that pious picture of me in my Sunday duds at age 14, verily I resemble the kind of scary being who might have tested our fairest Lord Jesus by flying him up to the temple parapet, etc. -- or, rather, I resemble a non-agile, mildly rotund version of that evil beast. And I had to go to my first day at a whole new school, in a whole new town, in the ninth grade, looking like that. I can almost understand -- almost -- why a small band of teen sadists and junior sociopaths had a field day with me for the rest of the semester.

Thankfully I had to look that way for just that one semester of ninth grade, from January to June. My parents had moved to Pennsylvania from Virginia the previous August, toting me along in the back of the family's Ford Country Sedan. The two of them squeezed into the front seat with my brother after turning down the back seats and sliding me into the cargo hold. And off we went . . . . (Insert a few strains of Simon & Garfunkel at this point in the teleplay; actors playing my parents, my brother, and me warble in harmony, "We've all come/To look for A-me-ri-ca . . .") When we got hungry, Dad pulled the Country Sedan into a Big Boy drive-through, and I plunked my OT-supplied "prism glasses" over my regular glasses so as to read the menu from my head-back position. (Not that I really needed to read the menu). Then the front-seat sitters handed back my burger, fires, drink, sundae, etc. and the four of us dined in style before before heading back on our excellent adventure. Soon after our arrival at the new house in Pennsylvania, we were hosting regular visitations of "homebound teachers" to my bedroom: a teacher a day, one for each of five subjects.

Then, in time for Christimas, I got my walking cast; and in January, I attended my new school for the first time. As if to compensate for any physical or social incapacity, I threw myself into
Thespians and Young Scientists of America. I co-led a Girl Scout troop, I even went to a weekend Scout camp-out in my walking cast -- bailing, along with everyone else, only after a torrential rainstorm came by in the wee hours and washed all our tents downhill.

In June I got sprung. The surgeons at Walter Reed told me I was all fixed and would have no further problems in connection with my spine.
____________________________________________

That's not how doctors treat adolescent spinal curvatures anymore. Girls (and the very occasional boy) with severe progressive scoliosis are not made to go through puberty in 20-pound plaster mufflers and overcoats which hide their own bodies from them for a year or two and make normal teenage life all but impossible.

Kids still have fusions for scoliosis -- this will continue until sufficient funding materializes for research into the causes and prevention of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. But fusion is simpler and safer than it was back in the day; in some cases, it can even be performed microsurgically, allowing the patient to go home from the hospital a day or two after surgery and sparing her that unspeakable degree of post-op pain. (I have no doubt why the pain was as horrible as it was when I was 13. The prevailing theories at that time seemed to hold that, except for general anesthesia to keep us quiet during surgery, children -- unlike adults -- had no need for pain medication. We got no morphine, were lucky to get an aspirin, after having our backs incised,our veretebrae sliced up, whole segments of our spinal columns reconstructed with the aid of ground-up bone-morsels carved out of the pelvis or some ribs.)

I've met some formidably feisty women who shared my own Boomer-with-Scoliosis Experience. These women all have a certain quirky, unpredictable sense of fun that belies their generally exceptional conscientiousness and stoicism.They surprise you when you least expect it with a hilarious, sometimes risque anecdote from their latest hospitalization -- or, if the conversation turns "nostalgic," with memories of adolescent rebellion and resourcefulness while confined to the dreaded Risser Jacket.

One woman demanded that her surgeon mold a shapely, anatomicaly correct cast-- allowing her developing breasts to "breathe" instead of squishing them flat in usual Risser fashion. I''ve seen a picture of this woman in her early teens, and it is astonishing. She is the only girl I have ever seen looking sexy and voluptious in a Risser jacket. No wonder she also, reportedly, climbed out the window while she was supposed to be immobilized in bed, to go roaring off with a boy on a motorcycle.

Another spirited woman told me she somehow managed to elude detection by her parents, including a demanding psychiatrist-father, while acquiring and using her self-prescribed stash of personal medication. Sentenced to months in plaster prison, she made the experience bearable by staying stoned for the duration.