Graceina Samosir
The first doctor wanted to break my back. I was growing wrong, he said. My body just hadn’t told me yet.
Even when my scoliosis was at its worst, as a young teen, I looked normal—until you pulled the hem of my shirt up past my shoulder blades and bent me over at the hips, my palms pressed to the ground, the ladder of my vertebrae snaking through my skin in a subtle S. Or until you studied the topography of bone beneath my almost-breasts, the tectonic plates of my uneven ribcage, the right side sloping up and out like I’d breathed into that space alone.
The doctor dressed me in lead and looked through me and found that my lumbar curve was nearing forty degrees at the base of my back, just below what you might call the “small” of it. This didn’t feel small. It felt like my whole future. Forty degrees is five degrees away from the danger zone for scoliosis patients, when doctors start talking surgery. Surgery means a bone graft, and a bone graft means resetting your vertebrae and fusing them together into a single, solid pipe. Your back will be ramrod straight, but that’s all it will ever be. I had danced for almost twelve years by that point. I was fourteen.
Instead, I got a new doctor and a back brace. The thing reminded me of a bulletproof vest, if it were made of the hard plastic they use to build playgrounds. Or a warped dress form, a hollow, contorted torso with an open seam down the front lined with silver buckles and strips of Velcro. One side of its ribcage tilted up and over in the opposite direction as my own. Inside, to make it more comfortable, the plastic had been fitted with a thick sheet of foam that barely gave under my thumb, even when I pressed as hard as I could. I would wear it to sleep every night until I stopped growing.
I told no one at my new school about the brace. I wasn’t so much afraid of being mocked, or of what people might think and never say—that I was weak, crooked, wrong—instead, I was most afraid of their empathy. If I couldn’t put words to how I felt about the body my body had in store for me, I didn’t want anyone else to step into the space where the story should have been and fill in the blanks.
At night, I dressed in thin cotton onesies so the waistbands of my pajama bottoms wouldn’t cut into my hips under the brace. I slid into its open maw and settled myself flat on the mattress, then worked my way up the Velcro closures, cinching them as tight as I could bear. Press your lips together between your teeth as hard as you can, feel them start to burn under the bite—it was like that, a physical, ordained silence. Like holding in a secret, the way I did for the friends whose agonies were tattooed on their skin under their T-shirts. We all wanted to open our mouths and climb out our own throats. I didn’t yet know that there’s a difference between holding something in and holding it together.
If I could have formed the words, I would have whispered: I hurt. Or: it hurts that a white man in a white coat speaks my body better than I do. I would admit, even the worst case could be worse. Then I would cry, kick, curl up into a ball, screaming: my body broke its promise. Or: there was never any promise. We want to believe our body is our native language, but maybe we have none, we’re all infants listening, with anguish or wonder, to the cipher of our heartbeats.
I’m always writing my body down, but I still rarely mention my diagnosis. The brace did its job—my spine even straightened out a little by the time I left home for college—but I can’t unknow that my body is the one writing this story.
It’s easier to let it. Less painful, even a little instructive, too: like a theme, a thread, my pain comes through in unexpected places. The inside of my hip, the hollow at my groin, the cordon of muscle by my armpit. If you don’t think about the future, it’s kind of wonderful, the body’s interconnectedness, like a Rube Goldberg machine, or an essay. I can make suggestions—good posture, lots of stretching—but mostly, I listen.
To get at my IT band, the physical therapist attaches two clear plastic cups to a vacuum shaped like an electric drill and presses their mouths to the outside of my thigh. Neat circles of skin bloat like they might burst; the tension screams into the space it leaves behind. The echoes stain my skin blue for weeks.
I do what I can. I let them show.
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Lena Crown is working on a book about belonging, the body, and the built history of St. Louis. Her work is published or forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Offing, North American Review, and Porter House Review, among others. She is currently stationed outside Washington, D.C., pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. Find her on Twitter at @which_is_to_say.