My Fall From Grace
Personal Essay
714 words
It’s been almost ten years since I fell down the back porch stairs. One minute I was standing on the top step, hurrying to get out of the rainy mist, and the next, my foot slid across the step, and I went horizontal. I landed on my back, then my elbow, then my back, and bounced, bounced, bounced all the way down. I laid at the bottom, stunned, worried that I’d done something irreparable.
It turns out, I did.
I have scoliosis, which is a curvature of the spine. Diagnosed when I was 17-years-old with a 50-degree curve, my case is considered severe. Even so, most people have to look closely to notice the way my left shoulder drops, how the hump of my ribcage protrudes on one side, or that my right hip rides higher than its counterpart. When I bend over at the waist, my torso makes a C-shape, veering left out of my pelvis and curving around like a piece of clover-leaf intersection.
The doctors, back when I was a teenager, recommended an operation that involved putting two metal rods down either side of my spine to crank me straight. I’ve always considered myself lucky that my parents didn’t force me to have surgery, although they consigned me to a life of crookedness.
For a long time, I ignored my scoliosis and merely lived with it. Nothing hurt, and so, I used my body. Movement was a religious experience - I ran marathons, completed triathlons, and competed in bodybuilding contests. Inhaling, exhaling, muscles humming, arms pumping, feet barely touching the ground. There were moments - hours, days, maybe years - when it felt as if motion were heaven itself; as if I defied gravity and flew graceful, strong, and unstoppable until I was a mere speck in the great big blue beyond.
My spine was good until suddenly, it wasn’t. Five years before I fell, I went out for a run and returned with a broken pelvis. Although it healed, it was the beginning of the end. The pain, mostly absent before, began to visit me regularly.
My fall down the stairs became the middle of the end, when the pain never stopped. Throbbing, aching, high-pitched screams inside me, which couldn’t be heard, only sensed, unrelentingly. I was certain an invisible fork was twisted in my back, turning the sinew of my muscles into lumps of agony.
I’ve tried all the cures and then some: hours of physical therapy, chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture sessions with dozens of needles. Pilates, barre, NIA (neuro-integrative activity). I’ve talked to pain psychologists, had spinal injections, meditated, done cranial sacral massage and biofeedback, and gone on anti-inflammatory diets. I’ve gulped pills and potions, hung myself upside down, and worn patches and shoe inserts and all manners of braces in an effort to make the squeezing vice of pain release me from its grip.
Now, ten years since my fall, I’m at the end. I’ve exhausted all remedies and myself. The pain has beaten me, and I cannot fight anymore. My body, once so free, has become a jail. As I bow into submission and acceptance, I take comfort in knowing I’ve spent myself. That mine, at least, is not a case of unfulfilled potential.
I’m 58 now, and after 41 years of avoiding surgery, I’ve finally decided to do it. It is the only thing I haven’t tried. I spoke with my surgeon last week and learned I will have twenty screws drilled into my vertebrae from T10-S1, attached to three titanium rods that will build a cage around my weakened spine and straighten me, forever. It will take a full year to recover from the nine-hour operation, and I will never bend my back again. Will I ever rediscover my grace? Might I? I don’t know.
There is no guarantee that the operation will be successful. I could end up worse off: still in misery, but inflexible or even paralyzed if the surgeon slips.
Still, I hope. I hope I will escape the pain. That I’ll find some freedom within the confinement. That I’ll find some peace in the middle of the inertia. I hope, desperately, that my fall from grace will be the beginning, finally, of something better.
