~  Keeping It Straight With Scoliosis ~

As we were in the car headed to my daughter’s 10 year old well checkup we were talking about how nice it will be to meet our new pediatrician. We recently moved and so this appointment had some anticipation with it.

The pediatrician came in smiling and we instantly knew she was going to be a great fit. She had to give us a hard time on our daughter’s files being transferred from our previous pediatrician because it was a novel.

See, my daughter started out her life fighting to survive and keeping my husband and I, the doctors and staff on their toes. She was born three months early weighing in at 2 lbs. We finally got to take her home with oxygen and a heart monitor and I never thought the day would come when she would finally be a wireless baby.

Fast forward almost 10 years and we were sitting in a new office reliving her medical life history with a new doctor.

The well checkup didn’t go as great as we thought, the doctor noticed my daughter’s spine and pointed out that it looked curved and that we needed to go get an x-ray as soon as we could. She mentioned it didn’t really look too bad so not to worry.

Of course what mother doesn’t worry when you have someone telling you your child’s spine isn’t straight?!

We got my daughter’s x-ray and that evening we got a call from her doctor apologizing and telling us that our daughter has scoliosis, it was worse than she thought and that we needed to go to Seattle Children’s Hospital. Time to take a deep breath and know that things could be worse.

I did some research and educated myself more on scoliosis so by the time we went to Seattle Children’s, I wouldn’t be as shocked to the numerous scenarios. Everything started to make sense, the pain my daughter was in was not in fact just growing pains.

There are a few different types of scoliosis and my daughter was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic scoliosis. Scoliosis and the severity of it is based all on degrees. How bad the degree of the curve is will determine the proper treatment. She has a 20 degree curve up top and a 30 degree curve on the bottom and she hasn’t even hit her growth spurt yet which was the cause for concern. They also issued an MRI because her curve actually goes the opposite way and they don’t see that as often.

So after speaking to two different doctors and in the end seeing an Orthopedic Surgeon, my daughter was casted for her custom made brace.

The day we went to go pick it up and get fitted for it, my daughter was amazing. She took all the information in as well as she could and she knew what to do and did it with a smile. She learned how to care for it and accepted the fact that she is to be in her cast 20 out of 24 hours a day until she is about 17 years of age.

She is a trooper and even though she is still adjusting to having to wear a piece of plastic around her body, she has done so with patience, acceptance and a smile on her face.

We are beyond blessed to have her as healthy as she is because things could have turned out so differently.

We will take scoliosis and keep our perspective straight!