THE CURVED ROAD

Emma Hwang ’24

I felt the world around me collapsing. The white walls of the hospital room tightly suffocated my trembling self with the smell of sanitizer and despair. I pinched myself, thinking, “Oh my god, this is just a dream.” By the hundredth pinch, reality drowned me in an ocean of hopelessness. I silently screamed for a breath, for a moment’s reprieve, to wake up from this nightmare that I refused to accept. But the longer I waited to wake up, the more I realized I never would. The world that I knew just a minute ago slipped through my fingers like raindrops, and I never saw it again.

My life descended into a blur, as if someone had been moving the camera too quickly and only caught the hazy lines of my memories. When I returned to school the next day, everything was normal. Nothing had changed. How could everyone be walking to class and gossiping and buying snacks at the vending machine when I wasn’t the same person anymore? An enormous burden now imprisoned me in a cage, leeching onto my spine and twisting it like a corkscrew. And alongside my spine twisted my identity into something mortifying: a victim of scoliosis.

Every time I thought about my new label, my heart burned with embarrassment and froze with guilt. Is this my fault? I began to wonder. What did I do wrong? Am I a bad person? The more I thought about these possibilities, the more I wandered deeper and deeper into a wilderness taunting me with questions. I was lost, alone, and without a light to guide me. My hands were chained and my feet fettered. There was nothing I could do to console myself about the impending doom of surgery.

But then the light broke through as if some divine being parted my curtains of despondency as a single ray of hope spilled into my life: a non-surgical physical therapy treatment.

With the introduction of yet another variable in the scoliosis equation that was my life, I threw myself into my physical therapy as if I had sky-dived into a hurricane. Only this storm was not just painful emotionally—it was physically grueling, too. I pushed myself to my limits, then went a thousand times past them. I swallowed my pain until I could not see any possibility of surviving it—and went beyond. From morning through late afternoon, for three weeks, I gritted my teeth and plowed through the searing pain and the flaming hurt. I was wishing with all my heart that I could be in school instead of missing classes to attend physical therapy. I sweated. I cried. Often, I found myself struggling to breathe through the pain, collapsed and exhausted, melting onto the floor and in incredible pain.

I was hurled into a world where pain was the norm. A doctor would say to me, “Emma, this is called ‘The Chair.’” (The name, in hindsight, gives the implication of a torture device, which is not unfitting to describe the physical pain it was capable of triggering.) “So, Emma, it is a mechanism in which you sit down on this cushion, like a chair, flatten your back against it, there you go, like a chair, and go ahead and rest your arms on these armrests, just like a chair.” Only this chair had about three belts and five pads that required strapping and cranking and locking into position to not only untwist my spinal curve on my right but also mirror the curve on my left side. When examining the photos of myself in The Chair, one would speculate that to twist my body as much as it was being pushed, I must have had no spine. Only a spineless human snake would be able to fit in this position. But no, this Chair is indeed for the benefit of your spine. Oh, and it’s 7 feet tall and weighs over 200 pounds, and you need to be secured here for twenty-one minutes at a time, each minute seemingly longer than the last, twice a day, for about two years. You know, just like a chair!

And that was only one of the four types of therapies that entailed my daily routine. As exhausting as it was, I simply had to keep going. I somehow fought through it and stood on my two feet again. It didn’t matter how many times I got knocked down; I got up and kept going. I was stronger than I ever thought possible.

After my three weeks of hell concluded, I was finally free to return to school. My classmates raised eyebrows at my sudden reappearance, as if I had resurrected myself from the dead. Upon seeing this apparition of my past self, who was now strapped to a wheelchair, they saw me as a completely new being. My personality had dampened. The creative, sunny, cheerful girl, who would make the downhearted laugh, who would give handmade cards on birthdays, who would draw her friends’ favorite cartoon characters for them, vanished like a warm breath in the cold winter air. I acquainted myself with misery and I sacrificed the time for making and giving gifts to make time for physical therapy. The girl that I had been was reduced to nothing more than an unfortunate patient who could benefit from a dose of pity and a helping hand to push the poor thing’s wheelchair. But I had no time for pity. I had no time to salvage the broken remains of my reputation. I needed to get better. But how? I was juggling a plethora of tasks: schoolwork, high school applications, the school musical (which I considered quitting, which would break my heart as I had finally been cast as a lead), and on top of that, daily, three hours of at-home physical therapy. The cherry on top? My back brace, stiff as iron and restrictive beyond imagination, was to be worn at all times. With my objective in hand, I reworked my work ethic to meet my demands. I mastered the art of working around the clock and sacrificing art and homework to focus on my health. But most of all, I learned how to grit my teeth and endure the daily struggle. I developed a regimented routine to save every minute for my therapy. I was tremendously dedicated to getting better. I had no other option.

So often we focus on our accomplishments as a single moment in time. We win a championship. We score first place in a spelling bee. But how often are we faced with the task of achieving beyond our best daily? And for several years? It requires an unimaginably bottomless supply of effort. It would be impossible for me to accurately articulate how strenuous the therapies were, especially for a child. But as demanding as it was, I chose to remain optimistic, praying that my efforts would bloom into something positive.

Finally, three months later, my judgment day came. I nervously twirled my fingers around the hem of my shirt as I waited for the doctor to give the results of my MRI. The wait was worth it. The curve on my spine went from 54 degrees, within the surgical range, to 35, below the range. I was no longer in danger of surgery. I was free, like a bird that had been released from its cage. The toil and tears had all been worth it. I felt the warm glow of my personality returning, radiating stronger until I found the girl I once was.

My journey did not end there. From then even until now, I still complete my daily physical therapy and wear my back brace. Though my doctors have loosened my schedule, I still endure the endless struggle that comes with being a scoliosis patient. Now, I bear my title proudly upon my chest, ready to spread my wings and take flight in a world that I know I can make for myself.

But as I began to close this chapter of my life, I was reminded that many others are just beginning their stories. One night, a close friend of mine whom I have known since preschool texted me that something had happened and her family needed my help: her younger sister, twelve years old at the time, was diagnosed with scoliosis. As soon as my eyes met the words on my screen, I was taken back to that asphyxiating white hospital room with the smell of sanitizer and despair—and loneliness, too. I had known no one who was in the same situation as me. There was no one I could turn to for advice or emotional support. I was trapped in a cage where everyone could see me, yet I could see no one. The recollection of the memory hit me like a wave taking me under. The pain was still vivid in my mind. I couldn’t let that happen to my friend’s sister.

I texted my friend for another thirty minutes, offering her all the information she needed to know about scoliosis while also embracing her and her family with as much compassion and empathy as I had in my heart. We decided that I would meet them in person so that I, a scoliosis veteran, could talk to and encourage her sister.

When I met with her sister, I could see so much of her in my thirteen-year-old self. She was like any other girl, but a shadow of fear and doubt shaded her eyes. My heart broke because I knew her pain. But at the same time, I knew I needed to plant the seed of resilience in her mind to guide her with physical therapy. I explained to her that therapy might be the most intensely challenging hurdle of her life, but I promised that it was all going to be worth it. I let her touch my back brace and with my words painted all of the colors and patterns she could pick for her brace. A swirly cotton-candy pink? Rainbow butterflies? Her eyes brightened with her imagination.

From the beginning, I recognized my crucial role in helping her achieve good health because I was the only one who could comprehend the emotions stabbing her. I could hear the voices of doubt in her head and could see the nightmare she faced. Being the only person to truly understand her, I committed to helping her conquer fear by breaking the boundaries that scoliosis trapped us in and embracing her when she needed me most. Our worst fates intertwined like ribbons into a bow, bringing the best and most beautiful qualities out of both of us.

Now that she has straightened out her spine, I see how much progress she has made. My heart swells with pride and joy when I think about how far she has come. We have come to recognize our unique friendship: how I am a role model for her, yet she continues to pleasantly surprise me with her swift progress. How my diagnosis of scoliosis and my struggle through therapy was truly a divine stroke of luck because I was able to come to her aid and be her light in the storm when she had none. She inspires me to be my greatest self so I may one day have more opportunities to support others and bring beaming smiles to their faces. She has taught me that any effort, big or small, can be that single ray of hope that someone may desperately need.

Whenever I retrieve that faded memory from the back of my mind, when I felt my heart sink to the floor in that dreaded white hospital room, when I felt my spine twisted by The Chair, when I felt stinging eyes boring into my back brace, I no longer slump with despair. I stand up with dignity, as straight as I desire, carry myself as tall as a giant, and fly as far as my wings can soar.