
When he rose from his chair to shake his surgeon’s hand, 17-year-old Nicholas Peters stood 4 inches taller than he had just a few months before. “Thank you for making me feel better,” Nicholas said to Dr. Michael Glotzbecker, the surgeon from the Boston Children’s Hospital Spinal Program who had operated on his spine. With a little prompting from his parents, Nicholas added, “I can bend over to play with my jeep.”
…Miranda Day: More than a diagnosis
Miranda Day was born with a rare type of congenital scoliosis and a tethered spinal cord, a condition where the spine is split into two and entwined towards the tailbone. After her first surgery in her family’s home state of California, it became clear to doctors that it wouldn’t be her last. “Scoliosis isn’t life-threatening, but it can be a detriment to your well-being,” says Day. “My parents’ goal was to give me the best quality of life and not have any setbacks physically or otherwise.”
Jordan’s Story: The scoliosis rollercoaster
I like to call life a rollercoaster; sometimes you go up, and sometimes you go down. When you’re up, you are going through parts in your life when you are happy, and when you’re down, you’re going through parts in your life that make you sad, and nothing can make you feel happy. At one point in my life, I was always riding down.
The five emotions of raising a child with infantile scoliosis
One night, while doing our son’s usual bath routine, I saw what looked like a hump on his back. Avery was 6 months old at the time. At first, I thought that it was just something I was imagining, but the hump never went away. In fact, it seemed to get worse. When Avery was 13 months old, he was officially diagnosed with infantile scoliosis, a rare form of scoliosis that occurs in children under 2 years of age.
The first hospital we were referred to would not even consider treating Avery until he was at least 18 months, and that was not a guarantee, so after doing some research, we came to Boston Children’s Hospital for a second opinion. We were referred to Dr. Michael Glotzbecker, one of the surgeons in the Spinal Program at Boston Children’s Orthopedic Center that specializes in early onset scoliosis. …