My Aching Back: How Spinal Fusion Changed My Life
40 years later, I’m still learning how to manage my scoliosis.
Early on in my Yoga Teacher Training program, we were talking about our path to yoga and our decision to enroll in Teacher Training. Although I started doing yoga in the mid-1990s, the genesis of my yoga practice goes much farther back, to some time around 1980.
When I was 12, I started having back pain, and the pain got worse and worse as time went on. I was miserable. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sit for long periods of time, and most activities caused back pain.
After at least a year of complaining, I finally got my mother, who was inattentive on a good day, to take me to the doctor. The doctor came in, looked me up and down, and said to my mother in a very derisive voice, “Your kid’s back hurts because she’s fat.”
Then he turned to me and said, “If you’d push yourself away from the table and do sit-ups instead of stuffing your face, you’d be fine.”
There were no x-rays, no exam, just a snap judgment based on my size.
I know, I’ll give you a moment to absorb the horror of this.
