Scoliosis Story

When I was diagnosed with scoliosis at age eight, all I wanted to do was hide. I wanted to hide the way I looked, I wanted to hide the fact that I couldn’t do things the way other kids could, and I wanted to hide the pain. I’d layer big sweatshirts over my back brace so that no one would see how badly I was struggling. But because it wasn’t that easy to hide, kids at my school found out about my back brace and I was relentlessly bullied.

By my freshman year of high school, both the pain and the bullying had gotten so bad that I ate lunch every day in the nurse’s office. I began to get depressed, and I developed an eating disorder that I’d battle and overcome within the next decade. When I turned sixteen, my back brace came off and I moved from West Seneca, N.Y. to Sleepy Hollow N.Y. I had signed a development publishing deal as a songwriter and needed to be closer to New York City to make it work. Some of my biggest dreams were coming true. Reveling in my success as a young songwriter, I developed a strong denial coping mechanism and ignored my scoliosis. I stopped going to doctors and cleverly learned how to dress to cover my curved spine. By age eighteen, I had enrolled at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU and by age nineteen, I signed a major label record deal with Universal Motown Records. The next year, I released a top 40 Billboard Pop single, and my career took off. I toured the entire country many times, played arenas, and eventually started writing songs for some of my heroes like Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Lady A and more. Ignoring my scoliosis worked quite well for a long time. I guess that sometimes denial as a coping mechanism really works.

Around age thirty-one, with a successful career as a songwriter who was hired to write for companies such as SONY ATV, BMG, and Disney Music Group under my belt, I started noticing more pain. I experienced some discomfort here and there in my twenties, but this pain was different. It was stabbing. I remember standing in my kitchen one day and not being able to chop vegetables because it felt like a knife was digging into my spine. A few weeks later, I lost feeling in my left leg. I finally told my husband the secret I’d been relentlessly hiding for a couple years at that point: that the scoliosis I had was starting to cause debilitating, life altering, daily pain.

I had x-rays done and met with several different scoliosis surgeons. The consensus between them all was that I needed surgery, or I would end up in a wheelchair relatively soon, not to mention live a life full of immense pain. On February 3rd, 2022, I endured a ten-hour, 14-level spinal fusion surgery to correct my scoliosis. I woke up from surgery vomiting, as I was allergic to the morphine I was given. Two days post-op, my lungs collapsed, and I needed an emergency chest tube. After ten nights in the ICU, I went home, only to faint the next day. I had to return to the ICU via a very painful ambulance ride, with my entire spine having just been cut open and operated on. When I was readmitted to the hospital, it was discovered that 600Ml of fluid had built up on my spinal cord and was compressing my brain. The fluid was drained from my spine while I was awake, and I was then kept in the ICU for another week to ensure I wasn’t septic. I had antibiotics given to me intravenously every two hours, so I barely slept for a week. After a week in the ICU, I was told I was not septic and sent home. However, I began to have issues breathing again, along with awful pain in my side. A trip to the pulmonologist revealed I had another lung collapse from a pleural effusion. That fluid was drained in a process called a thoracentesis, where you are awake while fluid is drained from the pleural cavity. It feels like you are suffocating when your lung pops back open.

After that pleural cavity was drained, I could finally start healing. That was March 14th, 2022. That means that for about six weeks, I was in and out of the ICU, struggling to get my lungs back. Before surgery, I had mentally prepared to rehab my back, but I was not prepared to rehab my lungs. My pulmonologist gave me an incentive spirometer to use while at home, and I was blowing at 700 units, when at my age, I was told I should be at 3500. I had to re-learn how to breathe, how to walk, and how to sing. I also suffered from PTSD and entered intensive trauma counseling.

This surgery and recovery were undoubtedly the most difficult times in my life to date. Words cannot even begin to describe how difficult it all was. But because of these events in my life, I learned the power of God’s hand on my life and the power of my own strength. I have some pain and tightness now. I have good days and bad days. But I can assuredly say that even if I knew that I would have these intense complications, I would do it all over again. Not only because of how much better I feel, not only because I can now hike, cook, swim, and live life again, but because I became closer to God as a result of this process and because now, I know what I am capable of.

That girl who wanted to hide her scoliosis is no longer hiding her story. I am making it my mission to put my story of overcoming out into the world. I want to inspire others, whether they have scoliosis or not, to overcome the odds and realize what they are truly capable of.

Trust me, you are capable of more than you ever dreamed.