plastic

“Just because she has to wear this now, doesn’t mean she’s any different.”

My sixth-grade classmates were sitting down on the tacky multicolored carpet, cross-legged and slouched. Some were staring blankly at the wall, others at a poster with diagrams and pie charts labeled “SCOLIOSIS.” Still others seemed fixated on a curious white plastic object placed on a chair in front of the room. Mrs. Shell continued.

“For example, if I broke my arm and had to wear a cast, you wouldn’t treat me any differently, right? Michelle might have to wear this brace now, but she’s still very much the same.” Her eyes glossed over mine, kind and reassuring. I shrunk in my seat, surprisingly a little embarrassed from all the attention. My teacher’s words echoed in my ears: I’m not different. I wanted so much to believe them, but a sinking feeling in my stomach told me that somehow, wearing a white plastic body brace under my clothes, missing P.E., and needing a friend to help me in the bathroom couldn’t be more unusual.

At that moment I was distracted by a commotion of hands - everyone had started passing it around to, in Mrs. Shell’s words, “get a feel” for this utterly foreign object that would be an inescapable part of my life for the next six years. Whispers clouded the room, with the occasional “Whoaaa” or “Cool!” Disturbed as I was by the idea that wearing a bulky plastic brace for scoliosis could be called such things, I was grateful for the response. Surely intrigue was better than indifference.

* * *

My sister was diagnosed with scoliosis when she was in the 8th grade. The subtle curve in her spine was mild enough to escape the mandatory school screening the year before, but she had the “good fortune” of discovering her condition a year later during a routine physical exam. The typical curve angle that requires one to be prescribed with a corrective back brace is 20 degrees. Hers was 37. I still remember walking down the hallway to the bathroom that night, interrupted by the eerie sound of my sister crying. I peeked in to see her squatting on her bed, staring at this awkwardly large contraption at the other end. There was an amalgam of feelings in that look – among them disbelief, indignation, loathing, fear. She stopped crying, and started laughing. Then started crying again. I was just a confused onlooker then - it was ridiculous, really, to think that this behemoth of plastic and styrofoam was actually meant to be worn. I couldn’t help but laugh with her.

It was this ordeal that led my mom to take me along on my sister’s next checkup. She had already felt responsible for the severity of my sister’s condition, and wanted to make sure that if something was wrong with me, too, it didn’t escape under the radar. That was the day, at nine years old, that I found out I had a spinal curve of 19 degrees – all but in numbers enough to prescribe me with a brace. Without thinking, fresh images of my sister laughing and crying and crying and laughing surfaced, and so did my tears.

* * *

It was a Wednesday, but to me it was a dreaded Loren day. Scheduled once every four months, “Loren day” was my mom’s euphemism for my appointment with Loren Rojek. It’s not that he himself was unbearable. For the record, Loren was tall, unassuming, and handsome. He had gentle, deep brown eyes that made you feel you could trust him, and he greeted every patient like a long lost cousin. Loren was a certified prosthetist orthotist - in other words, he cut, fit, measured and adjusted my brace to make me as comfortable as one could be when confined in a piece of hard plastic. The reason why I so dreaded these appointments with the pleasant man was because, more than anything, it reminded me of how blatantly different I was forced to be. Even if the adjustments were for the better, there was nothing like a good brace-fitting session to remind me that, while my classmates wore tight hipster jeans, mini skirts, and midriff-baring tank tops, I had to stick to clothes one size too big in an attempt to hide the Quasimoto-esque hump on my back revealed at the slightest slouch. As if I weren’t awkward enough, underneath my brace my body was petite, gangly, and frustratingly undeveloped, and I hadn’t gone through my growth spurt yet. The key to curbing scoliosis with a brace is maximizing correction before one’s growth is completed, as the spine then hardens and will ideally become permanently static. For girls, this usually means about one and a half years after they start their menstruation. I was in the tenth grade, and I didn’t start yet.

“Kyungha, are you crying?”

My mom was driving down the 57 freeway, nervously checking up on me in the rearview mirror. I must have been a sad sight. Lost in my own pity party, head leaned against the window, I stared blankly out at the passing cars. Almost on cue at what I mistook for an acknowledgment of my pain, a fresh batch of tears threatened to flood my eyes.

“Do you know how blessed we are? How lucky you are that this brace even works for you?”

A two in three chance, something like that. Big deal. Surely the chances of not having scoliosis at all were greater.

“Don’t you remember Lucy?”

Of course I remembered Lucy. We met her at a scoliosis forum at the hospital, where we found out her scoliosis had so relentlessly worsened (despite orthotic treatment) that her stomach, crushed underneath her contorted spine, now became helplessly full from a single banana. But feeling sorry for someone else at the moment was out of the question, and my tears of misery quickly became hot and bitter. Couldn’t we focus a little on my own present misfortune, mini-skirt-less and all?

* * *

“Hey Varsity, help roll up the mats!”

After a grueling last minute practice of trying to stuff as much new choreography into our heads, fifteen

cheerleaders scrambled to flip over the dusty blue stunting mats and put them away. Usually tedious and replete with resentment as the same five people always seemed to be doing the work, today the task was attended to with renewed vigor; I was elated. The news I had been waiting on my toes for all week was finally out –I was going to be captain! My lips involuntarily curled in sheer delight at the idea. My mind couldn’t be further from grungy blue mats, not when there were summer practices, conditioning, competitions, sleepovers, infraction sheets, captain meetings to think about! My vision of the perfect senior class routine was interrupted only by the chime of the untimely school bell, at which I somewhat managed to return to earth and hastily put on my brace. Little more than a nuisance now, I distractedly strapped it back on and tightened its three Velcro straps, pulled on my favorite pair of jeans, and grabbed my A.P. U.S. History book.

“Varsity! Black polo and skirt tomorrow, don’t be late!”

Soon I would be calling the shots. I could hardly breathe, and yet I was sure that had nothing to do with Velcro.

* * *

I had just finished emptying the last bag of old Halloween candy into a glass dish on the hallway mirror table. Imagining the texture of stale Tootsie Rolls and unwanted root beer candy, I cringed slightly; it was no wonder our neighborhood wasn’t too popular with trick-or-treaters. I chuckled at the thought of the toothy teenagers who came around last year with their empty pillowcases – my mom wouldn’t have a problem being generous with the goods this time around.

Halloween was never big in my family. Other than the bowl of mysteriously old candy we put out each year, and the recycled Halloween costumes which I usually took off for my church’s alternative event for the night (consisting of carnival games, a celebration of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, and enough candy to make up for skipping trick-or-treating), it was just another day that came and went. This year, however, was an anomaly to those forgettable Halloweens past. This year, I had only a costume to put on. It might have been made of recycled material, but apart from that it had little in common with the costumes I was familiar with. In a way, it was my most luxurious one yet: custom fit and molded to my body, it covered the top of my torso to my pelvic bone in the front, and curved in the back to span across the bottom of my shoulder blades to the middle of my rear. There was a gap in the back that allowed my body to squirm in, bridged by three white Velcro straps attached with shiny metal buckles. Wearing it, I resembled a white Terminator, or a prototype human-robot hybrid of sorts. The image was so comical I would have laughed in spite of myself if it weren’t for one looming piece of reality - that, despite its resemblance to one, this wasn’t a costume. It was my brand-new brace, bestowed upon me by the crippling symptoms of scoliosis, an “abnormal lateral curvature of the spine” I had been diagnosed with two years ago. I didn’t even know how long I was to be strapped to the thing but for the doctor’s depressingly vague words – “when you stop growing.” As I continued to stare at my rigid, custom-made fate, I recalled a familiar image. Would I be crying at my misfortune or laughing at the peculiarity of such a shot-by-shot replay of events, grateful that I at least had someone who could empathize?

Tomorrow my sixteen-year-old sister was going to visit my class and talk about this thing called scoliosis, determined to ensure I wouldn’t suffer the same torturous fear and embarrassment she did from feeling so misunderstood. However dubious I was that this would make my situation less mortifying, she had already spent her time meticulously arranging data charts, facts, and graphs onto a neat little poster board and I felt rude to interrupt. In a way, her confidence in a better experience for her sister lit in me the slightest flicker of hope, hope that it wouldn’t be so bad. Just until I stop growing.

I looked up at the mirror once more and with a straight face did the best robot dance I could, laughing and hoping a sense of humor made time pass faster.