Into The Brace

After my first appointment, my doctor told me to start a core strengthening activity, either karate or dance. Right before we went to that appointment my mom took me to the Nutcracker and I loved it so I decided on dance. My first ballet class was very interesting because I was and still am very clumsy and was the only kid in the class who had no dance training beforehand. I still had a lot of fun though and continued dancing for the next 6 years. Unfortunately my back got worse and worse until it reached 26 degrees in 2011. A new doctor came in and told me I needed to get a back brace to hold my spine in place as I continued to grow.

We met Corey, he was the orthotist who made my brace, at first I was really shy and he was funny and really nice.  He took a bunch of measurements of my back, and then I had to wear a long body sock that he molded plaster around. He used the plaster mold to make the brace, a process that took about an hour, and then I got to pick out a pattern to put on the brace (I chose the blue butterflies and a ballerina sticker).
 He told us that he would call when the final brace was finished.

About one month later he called us and we went in to get the brace fitted properly. We had to stay there for over six hours to get it fitting comfortably. He told us to go eat something and come back in an hour to see how it fit walking around. My mom, my sister, and I all went to Arby's and I was having a lot of difficulties walking around and sitting. When we first got into the car I couldn't get in easily and when I eventually got in I tipped over, my mom and sister started laughing at me and I couldn't sit back up so I started to cry, they had to pick me up and help me a lot through the process, but soon I got used to the way it felt.
I was supposed to wear my brace 23 hours every day but I couldn't because I had dance about 2 hours several days a week. I was really worried that the kids would make fun of me because of it but thankfully they didn't. Everyone thought my brace was really cool and Corey even made a brace for my doll!

Dr. Novacheck told me the brace would last me about two years.  Because I started growing like crazy for the next five years, my first brace lasted me about nine months (I think the longest I've had a brace was 1 year).  During this time,  I was slowly improving my dance skills and moved up from the pre-ballet class to level 1 and was the first person in my class to get all of my splits. I did one spring performance in 2010. I was a flower and a firefly. I was also in the Nutcracker and got to be a gingerbread cookie (because we forgot to go to the audition). I worked my brace in around all my dancing and sometimes I would put it on for harder combinations because my hips and ribcage were not centered so it messed up some of the turns I had to do.

First Back Appointment

When I was 8, one year after we found out that I had scoliosis, we got an appointment at Gillette Children's to see what scoliosis actually was. I had to get two x-ray pictures and went to see what the doctor had to say. I had two curves in my back making it an S curve, the top and bottom curve were both 20 degrees. She told us that at some point in life I might need a TLSO, which is a back brace that holds my spine in a position to stop progression.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

In The Beginning...

This all started with a trip to the emergency room.  When I was 7, I got the flu and had to get a chest x-ray to see if I had pneumonia. The x-ray technician pulled my mom aside and told her I didn't have pneumonia, I had scoliosis.