SCARIER Than Halloween

So this is my spine.

You might have to look closely to see it.

David took the picture for me in our bathroom Thursday night.

I had him take it because,  earlier that day, at our weekly session,  I had asked the very gifted woman who works with such care on helping strengthen the muscles that hold me upright to do something:

I had asked her to draw...

in white chalk on my brown shirt...

where the 'buttons' of my backbone were.

This she did and here are the results. This picture below is a close-up.

The lateral line is my braline.

If she had kept going and drawn the ribs too, we could all see that I'm listing sharply, like the Titanic, 30 minutes after impact. In the last few days I've been fixing to blog light-heartedly about this scoliosis that has so recently expressed itself in my body, even though one is apparently born with the condition. But then, just now,  when our ridiculously late Saturday mail finally came and I saw that Mass General had sent me  the images on CD of the MRI they did of my lower back, my comic impulse kind of drained away.The hospital failed to include any narrative about my case  - I will have to ask my PCP for that on Monday - but the images are pretty horrifying if I'm reading them right.The timing is funny because just yesterday Dr. Scott Fuller, the wonderful chiropractor I see every other week, took a notion all on his own to draw a sketch of my back,  based on his X-rays, and mail it to me.

I consider it such a kindness that he would do this for me. I have wanted so much to be able to really picture what was happening in there in there, so I could understand where the pain was coming from and maybe help alleviate it. 

Now I have these official images and I'm feeling more alarmed. It's what behind the little beaded curtain that's significant. And the curve looks different because this 'picture' is taken from the back and Dr. Fuller's was looking at me from the front.

My lumbar spine looks like the tail of a lobster! Now I just want to SEE Dr. Fuller, I just want to SEE Dr. Bennett and get somebody to explain what I'm looking at. It's hard to be alone with pain at night, but in the daytime at least it's nice to have some other kind humans willing to help shed some light on what's going on in your little insides. I don't feel hurt or mad; I don't feel like my body betrayed me – nothing like that. I just want to befriend this faithful servant who has done my bidding so uncomplainingly all these years..

Keep on Dancin'

(This is a picture of my spinal column ha ha..) 

I've always said if something bad happened to me – say if I had a colon resection and needed to wear a colostomy bag forever after - I'd just strap on that sucker and keep on dancin’.Well I don’t have a colostomy bag and I HOPE I don’t have a melanoma (see last week's post) but I do have one heck of a crooked backbone, which did not express itself until I was part way through a yoga class in 2005.“Um, so you have scoliosis?” the yoga instructor came over and whispered to me as I was deep in Child's Pose.“What?  No! I mean I don’t think so! Why, is there something wrong with me?”She was so kind. She kept me after class and had me bend over from the waist and sure enough:  one half of my rib cage IS higher than the other which is the test they use in elementary schools the world over to check for this lateral twisting of the spine.It happens right in the womb it seems. You just sit curled up for too long in one position and the die is cast. People who have severe scoliosis have to have surgery: a rod goes in and by degrees straightens you right out. My friend had this operation back in the late '70s and had to walk around for a few months inside a tubular cast that went from her chin to her pelvis, Now she climbs mountains and paddles kayaks and I don’t know what-all else. She has no pain.I who started out with a case so mild nobody even knew about it had no pain either -  until this last year . Oh my pants started to fit funny, yes - the fly kept tending to the northwest - but I just figured I'd bought a bunch of cheap Made In China pants. It's when my vertically striped starting heading northwest too that I realized something was up.  I have pain now which is why I have to go the Y all the time and quite literally keep on dancin'.  I do Zumba and Nia and Hip Hop, I do Pilates and Yoga. I hang off a giant therapy ball, I do 40 sweaty minutes of Core and Glutes Class and I must say it's interfering hugely with my work day. Still, what are you gonna do? If it helps me keep moving then it's worth it. I know myself; I know my temperament. If I didn't HAVE to keep moving on account of this new affliction I'd just sit at my laptop  24/7 and slowly become a sort of garden gnome.Here's the honest to God image of my spine, the truth-in-advertising version of that Stairway to Heaven at the top here. It scares the daylights out of me every time I look at it. That undulating white thing is a backbone?