Scoliosis: Life, Support & Friends

"...To talk of many things! Of meds and splints and spinal facts! Of surgeries and dreams! And how much a curvy spine can suck and how we deal with things! " It was an interesting sort of holiday season. The sort of interesting that ends with a person spending two and a half days at a bus depot, sleeping on the floor, making friends with random strangers, and doing your gosh-darned best not to lose your mind. Lambchops tiddliwinks. I mean-! I spent the solid portion of the last week trying to get back into the school mood. New classes, more work than last semester, I need to get a part time job, I'm still trying to get my writing to professional standards and, oh! What's this? An appointment with the Advanced Spinal Care Center in Calgary for cortisone injections? This week? What?! Yes, apparently time itself decided to speed up because I had no idea it would be so soon (and consequently told my teachers that, and I quote "will be going away sometime in the ne...

The outcomes of scoliosis treatment are being evaluated continually in an attempt to optimise the results for each scoliosis patient. The two prinicpal goals of any scoliosis surgery are to limit further curve progression and achieve some degreeof deformity correction. The greater the focus on deformity correction, however, the greater the risk of procedure, with the most obvious risk being limitation of spinal cord function. Advances in surgical technique, instrumentation, and intra-operative monitoring of the spinal cord have allowed greater and safer deformity correction than that achieved with the Harrington rod , which is the correction I had in 1989. The Harrington rod is from the era of the 1960s and 1970s. Deformity correction both radiographically and with regard to trunk shape is important to many patients with scoliosis. The functional outcome after fusion is equally important and may be assessed using a variety of methods, including measurements of physiologic function, s...

The Scoliosis Association (UK) will be holding a meeting specifically focused on infants in London. The meeting will be held on Saturday 26th June, 2010, at the Sir Herbert Seddon Teaching Centre at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, London. The meeting will be hosted by Mr Hilali Noordeen FRCS who, along with a team of scoliosis specialists, will be discussing the causes and diagnosis of infantile, juvenile and congenital scoliosis, treatment options and current research. There will also be parents discussing their personal experiences of coping with the condition and opportunities to ask questions and chat with other families. This is the first infantile meeting that SAUK has held for many years and it is a fantastic opportunity for parents of infants or young children with scoliosis to get dedicated information and to pose questions to scoliosis specialists. For more information please contact: 020 8964 5343 or visit the SAUK website where you can sign up onl...

My mom and I were recalling some of our later experiences in the blood thirsty adventure that is the Alberta Health Care system, and a particular memory got me thinking more about my second surgeon. I figured I did an Ode to Dr. Elf (lord help me if any doctor ever stumbles upon this page), and now it's time to address the issue of Dr. Stoic. When I hit the tragic age of 18 I was informed that I was no longer allowed to go to the Alberta Children's Hospital as I had exceeded their maximum height allowance. Also, last time they opened me up they counted my rings and discovered I was far older than appropriate for hanging around small children (apparently clowns can do it and no one makes a sound. Go figure.) So as I stated previously Dr. Elf and I laid out three potential surgeons. He patiently went through them one by one, giving a thorough explanation for each although suspiciously leaving out their criminal records which I request from anyone I spend more than five minutes ...

Simone's last post got me thinking more about my own personal experiences with my surgeons. Not the experiences involving them explaining what exactly scoliosis is and why I should fear for my life (I was a teenager, everything is exaggerated in my memory), but the personal experiences that rose from the witty banter and crude sarcasm that was exchanged between us while my poor mother watched on while shaking her head in dismay. When I was first diagnosed back in Kelowna at the age of 11 I went, at least temporarily to a local doctor by the name of Dr. I-Can't-Deal-With-Children O'Farrell. Maybe that's a bit unfair of me, my memory of that whole time is a bit blurred, and any recollection I do carry of him generally involves me feeling about two inches tall. I'm sure he was/is a good Doctor, but his experiences were with adults who figured the high arches in their feet gave them reason to complain until they had passed out. Perhaps it was a mercy that my spine went...

OK, so I am seeing a lot of blog posts coming out saying things like "have Scoliosis, come visit our Chiropractor", since when did the Chiros become professionals in twisted spines? For starters they are not medical doctors so I advise that you see a proper Scoliosis specialist before you see a Chiropractor! When I had my surgery in 1989 with a Harrington rod from T4 to L1 I was told in under no circumstances should I see a Chiro, Dr Jackson told me this from Southampton General Hospital, over the last 5 years that I have been running groups and chatting on various other groups, the general consensus across the board is do not see a Chiropractor, some groups do not even allow you to talk about them! I do have a slightly different view to most I have to say, I do allow people to talk about their treatments because I am all for sharing and if a patient had good results then share them, we are all individuals at the end of the day and we react to different treatments, however, t...

I went for a smear test with my local doctor and explained the problem to him that we had in Seville, he said he had done a lot of his training with a Orthopaedic surgeon so he knew about Harrington Rods and Scoliosis so this was of great benefit to me. He gave me an inspection and all seemed fine, my ovaries looked healthy and their were no cysts, he did say however that my vagina was small and very tight because the muscles were tense, he wondered if that could be the cause of the pain because of the muscles. He has instructed me to get a blood test on the 24th May to see if I am Ovulating, if I am not he feels this could be the root of the pain because that would be swollen.