a day in the life

A friend just asked what kind of effects my scoliosis causes besides back pain. She probably wasn't hoping for answer quite so thorough as this; nevertheless:

The worst possible result of my curve progressing too much would be that on a long-term scale, my heart, lungs, and other internal organs would receive continuous stress due to being compressed into a smaller space than what their DNA tells them they should have. As you might guess, hearts and lungs don't like this. They couldn't stay in optimal health under such conditions, and apparently keeping your heart and lungs healthy is sort of important, so getting the surgery to straighten my spine will be a big breath of relief for them (literally, on the part of the lungs).

Aesthetically speaking, the worse the scoliosis gets, the worse I would look. As of now my right shoulder is about an inch higher than my left. If it were allowed to get much worse, I would start to become more obviously bent over. Because in addition to being curved my spine is also rotated, my right shoulder blade sticks out a lot further than my left. I'm usually pretty careful to not have pictures taken of that side of me, or I look slightly humpback-esque. My crookedness is not usually very conspicuous, but there are a few places where it always gets noticed. Any time I'm getting my hair cut the hairdresser tries to get me to "sit straight" a couple times before they'll be convinced that I really am as straight as I can be. Same thing with getting my picture taken. It's annoying sometimes that clothes never fit exactly right, but they can hardly be expected to, consdering what they have to work with. For my senior prom I actually had a tailor make a dress that was altered to compensate for my higher right shoulder, so looking at me I looked more even on both sides. That was nice of the tailor.

The bigger problem with the crookedness would be that the worse it got, the more difficulty I'd have with mobility and my range of motion. I think that was redundant. If I didn't fix it now, I'd have a hard time doing basic things like walking and getting around on my own later in my life. I really enjoy walking. It's something I'd like to always be able to do.

So, even though most days I don't really notice my scoliosis, the truth is that it is slowly and steadily becoming more of a hazard to my overall well-being, and if I want to stay as healthy and happy as I feel now, this definitely needs to get fixed. Luckily I live in a time and place where that's actually an option.