About a month ago, on one of my first Fridays off, my mom stopped by on the pretext of visiting Petit Defarge. She happened to come at the tail end of a nap, so we hadn't been chatting for long when I heard a wail. I hopped up to bring out the baby when my mom said, "Before you go get her, I need to tell you something." Then she started to cry.
I wonder how many adult children make it through their parents' later years without having some version of that conversation. My stomach dropped to my toes and I dropped back onto the couch. It took her awhile to get the words out, but what she told me wasn't what I expected to hear.
My mom has scoliosis. I remember being screened for that in middle school, and being afraid I'd have it and would have to wear a back brace. She apparently was never screened but had the same fear, because she hid it. From everyone. For almost 50 years.
Her case apparently is one of the worst her doctor has ever seen. So bad that her spine is pressing on her lungs and other organs. If you do a Google Images search for scoliosis, you'll see pictures of people whose backs are pretty much pointing sideways. And yet my father, who has been married to her for 38 years, found out about this when a bill from an orthopedic surgeon's office arrived 6 months ago.
So if you don't do the adolescent back brace thing, what you have to do is have two major, invasive, 10-hour surgeries. They remove one of your ribs and use it to make a cage that fits around your spine and hopefully becomes part of it. You get a toolbox full of screws and plates and wires installed to hold the whole thing together. You get pretty much all of your vertebrae fused together. And after weeks of rehab and physical therapy, you have to wear the damn brace anyway.
I went to see her today for the first time. I tried two other days this week but was put off both times--she was too sedated the first time, and the next time she didn't want me to see her. She was worried it'd scare me. That frustrated me, but I have to admit that I was pretty taken aback when I saw her, swollen and intubated and hooked up to monitors and machines.
Being there at least made the whole thing a little more real. All week my dad gave me reports from the hospital, but it was hard to even believe that this was happening.
We went on beach vacations every summer. My mom has had short hair since I was in grade school. If things are really as bad as my dad and the doctors say, how could none of us have noticed this?
In the midst of trying to figure out who I am, now I'm questioning who everyone else is too.
