Meeting my Surgeon

During the school day I was picked up to go and see a surgeon who is going to help me decide what to do next. I had to go into the car for hours to finally get to London and into The National Orthopaedic Hospital. As we stepped out that car I was suddenly starting to feel some sort of sickly feeling or fear. Fear of there being nothing for them to do or finding out that my curve had become even worse than the last time I checked. I was told by a receptionist to wait to get another x ray done just to be up to date with what it looks like. After the first time of doing this I felt totally comfortable of taking another x Ray. (To read more about my x Ray go to my x Ray section of my blog.) Once that was sorted it was time for the real talk with the surgeon. I was sweating and felt so anxious and scared. I guess I really wanted it to be over. I was called to go to talk to him.

We all sat down and the surgeon greeted us. He put the x Ray on the screen and I just stared at it almost blaming myself for how big the curve was. The curve was even bigger than the last x Ray. When he told me that I was just shocked and felt my eyes start to water. This was just what I feared to happen. It was at least over 60 degrees and at this point in time it is probably even bigger than that. Now the part that I dreaded. Talking about surgery. Now we thought there were only two options:a brace(not a surgery) or the big spinal fusion to fuse my spine straight. The thing with the fusion is that it won’t allow my spine to grow any longer and my limbs would just grow more so I may be slightly deformed. The bad part was that my spine is not skeletally mature just yet and has a lot of growing to do and a brace would be useless with my spine. That scared me just thinking about it until he said that there was a third option! When he said that it made all of us confused as we were never told about a 3rd option. It is a magnetic rod surgery. This surgery is where they put a magnetic rod in my back that will straighten my spine with the push of a button. I was slightly unsure about it thinking that I still can’t grow my spine but then he told us that this surgery will allow my spine to actually grow! This option sounded brilliantly clever and I started to edge towards the option for that surgery! But they needed to discuss what bad things could possibly happen so I decided to stay out the room for this. I sat outside feeling actually mortified of the fact that what if there are so many horrible risks. What if one of them resulted in death? Luckily they weren’t even anywhere near than dramatic. I was expecting one of them to come out crying but everything was relaxed which reassured me that everything will be fine. The things that could happen could be a lot of blood loss, a screw coming lose etc. That doesn’t really frighten me as I know that can be fixed. We had to now book and appointment for surgery. We decided on the 10th of June which now is less than a month away! We thanked him for all his helped and he wished me the best of luck for the surgery. ( he is going to be the person who is going to perform surgery on me.) I had to take a few tests like height and weight and before we knew it we were on our way back home. Now we are just left with the decision on what surgery to go for. ( we have now chosen magnetic rods.) I left feeling a lot more confident than I came. Read below for my previous section on Hydrotherapy.