Living with Scoliosis: A Teenager’s Story
My Personal Journey
Hi, my name is Claudia Velasquez. I’m sixteen years old, and I was diagnosed with scoliosis when I was about 13 years old. It all started when I was feeling some pain in my back, specifically in my lumbar zone. I always used to have this kind of pain, but my parents took it normally, so we never went to the doctor. But there came a day where I stood in front of the mirror, looked at myself, and from that moment, I knew something was wrong with me. The right side of my back was deformed, just because that is the side my spine is taking.
I told it to my parents. They looked at me, and that was the moment when finally they were going to take me to a doctor. After a few days, we made a medical consultation with one of the traumatology doctors of the Policlinica in Puerto La Cruz. I went there, he was checking my back, and he told me that I had to do an X-ray of my back and pelvis. I did it the same day and instantly went back to the doctor, and yes, that was the right first moment when he saw the X-rays that I was diagnosed with scoliosis with two curves, one of them 33 degrees, that consists in the progressive deviation of my spine. I don’t consider it as a disease but a condition.
My Treatment
After that, the doctor told me that I was going to have to wear a brace all over my back, and the one that he wanted me to wear was very particular because it was one of the braces that people used to wear so many years ago. It was the most uncomfortable thing I have ever seen. The material was made of plastic, a very hard one. It had a metal bar up to my neck while that uncomfortable plastic was making pressure on my bones, and that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that I had to wear it twenty-four hours every day without resting, nothing, even for sleeping. I didn’t last even one day with it. My dad, in the night when I was sleeping, looked at me and observed that the metal bar up to my neck was gravely hurting me.
So, a few days after, we decided to go to another doctor and look for other options, another point of view. We went to another traumatology doctor in Puerto La Cruz, and the first moment he saw the brace that the other doctor put me to wear, he asked why I was wearing that, that we weren’t using that brace in this age. So he checked me out, and he decided I was going to use another type of brace for my spine that was called a “Boston Brace”. And that one was a little bit more comfortable just because it didn’t have that awkward metal bar up to my neck. So I had to wear it for like more or less a year and a half, and that was a struggle. Just because that one didn’t have that metal bar didn’t mean that it was comfortable.
Challenges and Acceptance
Wearing it for sleeping, going to school was very hard, even for hanging out with my friends. People started looking at me very weird and asking, “What is that thing?” “Why do you have to wear it?” And it always has been hard for me to explain it time after time my condition. My dad gave me the chance to wear it only in my house, for sleeping and stuff, and when I’m going to hang out or going to school, I can take it off.
I grew up, and a pair of months ago, my brace was making more pressure on me of what is supposed to do, so that was the moment I knew I had to order a new one, and here I have it. It is war. Without including all the complex I have with my body, my back, but I always try to think that God gives the worst wars to his best warrior. And that’s my life with scoliosis I’ve to be currently fighting with.