Written Winter 2022
Incidentally, I’m still crooked.
This was news to me, delivered by my new doctor. He is young and Googles things during the appointment. This should bother me, and maybe the usual young, post-frat, shaved-head-because-of-male-pattern-baldness vibe does bother me, except that I’m used to doctors pretending they know everything. I sort of like having one that doesn’t.
I think to myself, Look, I’m really not nervous, I’m really not, this is totally fine and normal and will be over by lunch. I’m almost twenty-five years old and have kept four people alive for a living during a pandemic. I am not a scared little kid anymore. I am fine.
And then my pulse is 120 BPM and the nurse asks if I sprinted to the office or something.
“Sorry, just, you know, doctors’ offices?”
She works in one. Maybe she doesn’t know.
He orders an x-ray so that he’d have a baseline. Off I trot to another part of the hospital, which is growing more and more familiar with the longer I work as a direct care provider, supporting people with appointments and imaging.
My lifetime exposure to radiation being what it is, I’m not exactly thrilled to be called back to the radiology suite. “Have you had a scoliosis x-ray before?” the nice tech (probably my age or younger) asked.
“Four times a year for almost a decade?”
“Oh, wow, you’re a pro!”
At some point in my childhood treatment for scoliosis, the rotating cast of x-ray techs started asking if there was any chance I could be pregnant. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen? Today I answer, “Thank God, no.” (When I was first asked that question, I could have legally terminated a pregnancy in all 50 states. Imagine that.)
The tech hands me two hospital gowns and starts explaining how to wear them so your ass is covered by one and your front by the other—before she sees a knowing look in my eye and points me to the bathroom.
In the little room, I remove my earrings and necklace. My smart top and professional pants. My bra I wore because I was going to the doctor. My glasses. I string up the two worn old hospital gowns and walk out, wearing nothing but my polka-dot underwear and my faux-leather flats that I have dubbed Grown-Ass Adult Woman Shoes.
I’m a little embarrassed about how much I thought about my outfit. I wanted my clothes to reflect what was true: look, a strong and competent professional woman who, yes, cleans up poop at her job sometimes and yes, is in so much pain sometimes that she can’t even clean up her own cat’s poop, but look at how put-together she looks! You wouldn’t even guess that she is someone who is afraid of doctors because everything they have ever done has hurt her! You wouldn’t even guess that she cried about this appointment to her cat last night! Look how well she’s handling life, surely you can prescribe her Celebrex and Flexeril for another year or so, yeah?
Look, I am almost twenty-five. I am a grown-ass adult woman. Everything is fine. This is totally normal.
Except when the tech says, “Hold your breath!” then, “Breathe!” and the x-ray encompasses every part of me at once, it feels like what they’re going to see inside me is a tiny, scared, crooked ten-year-old who wants to go home and doesn’t want to hurt anymore.
Instead, the tech yells out, “Wow, I didn’t realize you had so much hardware!” and I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to comment on that? I half-expect her to ask why I’m even in here, if my scoliosis is clearly fixed.
Except. It isn’t! The image shows a body that leans left, just like the body of that scared ten year old. The only difference is, my spine is completely fused and ram-rod straight from T4-L4. Then, immediately after the rods stop at T3. Boom. Hard left turn. 17 degrees the other way, the lines created by my neck and my spine pointing in opposite directions.
If my spine had feelings (it does, but in a different way) it is so, so clearly desiring to be crooked. Resisting straightness. Give her a literal inch and she’ll try to stretch herself a mile. Tell her to zig and she’ll zag.
(There’s surely a metaphor for queerness in there, somewhere, but that’s for another day, I think.)
It makes me think that if I hadn’t had surgery, my spine would have zagged and zagged and zagged and I would have ended up having it anyway, just at an older age and with a bigger curve to contend with. But what do I know, I studied racism and poems at college.
Because grown-ass adult shoes or not, I am still a girl with a crooked spine, in pain, standing in front of an x-ray machine. Heart pounding: alive alive alive. Stronger in all the important ways, but with the same diagnosis as the girl with her plaid skirts looking crooked in the fourth grade.
I leave my glasses in the little bathroom and have to double back once I noticed that the signs in the parking lot were blurry. I reach the reception desk, feet now aching in my grown ass adult women shoes. Itching for my sneakers. I point to my hospital bracelet, which I hadn’t removed, saying who I was so they’d let me back in.
Look, my full name, my birthday. X-ray for scoliosis.
Look, I’ve lost something of mine and I need it back.
Look, I was here. I am here again.
Next week, I’ll be sending out a happy little book list of medical memoirs that I love.
Until then, take care, sweet friends.
With love,
Liddy
PS: I recently had a medical memoir essay published in Pleiades Magazine’s “On Disability” issue. It’s not available online, but you can purchase a copy here: