Surgery

     If you’re visiting this page, then you un-doubtfully know what scoliosis is, and the surgery that can correct it. However, just a little background information, there are two main types, posterior and anterior. As the names suggest, posterior is through the back and anterior through the front. I happened to get the posterior type.  At my clinic, brochures showed other kinds of back surgery to correct scoliosis besides those two, but those brochures are long gone. We’ll just say there are two types.

     Screws and rods are put in place to keep the spine straight and, despite what people may think, they cannot be removed. Scoliosis surgery won’t make anyone’s back perfect but they can correct the curvature by fifty percent which in many cases can save the patients’ lives. Posterior surgery is the most common but it is said that anterior surgery has more advantages, being that less needs to be fused.  Both are painful, neither are fun, but they will give you perfect posture and a cooler scar than anyone else you know.

My Story

  I received the posterior surgery December 5, 2012 at Rainbow babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland. I was fifteen. It was early in the morning, a Wednesday, and still dark outside. The only things I brought with me were my phone and my iPod. My heart was racing, I was close to crying, and after reading all these bad comments about the surgery on the internet, I was terrified.  We parked the car and went inside where we sighed in. My parents and I were directed to a waiting room. I swear, I had never been this scared in my life. But just between us, the waiting was the worst part.

     They called my name, and I went into this long room (with my parents). There were rows of hospital beds on each side with curtains that you could pull close if you wanted to. All the beds were filled with children and teens sitting up happily, chatting to family. Keep in mind; this is where everyone is put before the surgery, so no one was sick or in pain or anything. The doctor gave me these cleansing wipes and I had to go into the bathroom and wipe my back clean, along with my legs, arms, and even my feet. I dressed in the hospital gown and went back to my little alcove where my parents were waiting.  They put in an I.V (It didn’t hurt) and pumped some type of medicine into it that was supposed to calm me down. I was still really scared though, and the medicine made it worse because I suddenly felt really drowsy and heavy and everything got a little blurry. I tried to continue talking after that but stopped because I was scared I sounded stoned. They wheeled me into the operating room and I felt like I was in some type of horror movie. There were tons of nurses and medical assistants and surgeons all over the place. I don’t remember seeing any medical instruments though.  A nurse came over and starting talking to me. She held a mask over my face and had me breathe in the medicine that was supposed to make me fall asleep. I thought it would smell like something but it didn’t.  The last things I remember was the nurse saying “Yeah, and you might not even remember this conversation right now.” I’m like “Really?” And that was all.

     I woke up in another room. I could sense that time had went by but it was just as if I fell asleep and woke up, I don’t remember anything from during the surgery. My back was aching and it hurt, but it was less pain then I thought it would be. The strange thing was, I kept repeating “It hurts it hurts, they said it wouldn’t hurt.” I remember being a little confused, why am I repeating this? It didn’t hurt THAT much.  Later on, I found out that this wasn’t actually the first time I woke up. Apparently when I woke up for real, I really was in a ton of pain and I was like screaming. Actually, no one told me that, I just put that in to make it sound more intense. (The screaming part.) ANYWAY, that was really weird.

     So, the hospital. The nurses would check on me a ton, every couple hours. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything because my stomach was still asleep but I got stuff through the I.V. The first few days, I slept pretty much the whole time. The morphine made me drowsy. I wasn’t the only person in the room. A curtain divided the room in half and on the other side was a little boy who had gotten the same surgery. Why they had an infant in the same room as me, I have no idea. He cried the WHOLE time. And the family with him had the T.V blaring and music playing and they were talking and laughing and it was SO loud. I kept waking up in the middle of the night because they would seriously not shut up. (Just saying if you or anyone you know gets this surgery and has to share a room PLEASE be courteous of your roommate, especially at night. It made the stay a lot harder for me.)

      I was forced to get up and walk around after the first day and it was really really hard.  I felt sick and the medicine made me dizzy. The nurses tried to have me sit up in a chair for at least half an hour. I threw up after ten minutes and had to lye back down. The nurses were all nice, I don’t want to say they’re not, it was just hard.  I was also forced to turn onto my side periodically. I had a little button I could press if I wanted more medicine.

     The boy and his family left and a new roommate moved in. A girl. She had a seizure or something from a McDonald’s sandwich that she ate and they were going to stick a tube down her stomach to see if anything was wrong. (Nothing was). I watched T.V.  and talked more.  I began to eat Jell-O and other little things.  The day I was going to leave, I was lazy and wanted my mom to help me get up. Somehow, I pulled a muscle in my shoulder and had to stay in the hospital another day.

     I was in the hospital for exactly one week. I thought that was hard, but my recovery was just as hard, if not more, then my stay in the hospital. I’ll try writing about that too.