My Doctor Gave Me A Devastating Diagnosis. A Year Later, My Follow-Up X-Rays Revealed Something Shocking.

I stood before the screen gripping my lumbar, as the black-and-white X-rays stared back at me. I was 45 and I’d never gotten an X-ray — hardly been to a hospital except to be born and once for an extreme case of poison ivy.

“That’s not me,” I protested, straightening my strained spine. I didn’t have anatomical terms for what I refused to see — the lower backbone bowed to the right in the shape of a capital C; the middle spine jogged to the left off-plumb; the shoulders and hips were cockeyed. “You got the X-rays mixed up.”

“Sorry, it is,” the doctor traced the curve with his finger. “Bordering on severe scoliosis.”

“But I just ran a 10-mile road race...” I winced, as fireworks exploded in my back, hips and legs. “Placed fourth in my age group, fastest time...”

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“You telling me you never knew?” He frowned. “The condition manifests in childhood.”

Tears glossed my eyes, my fit middle-aged body crumpling in on itself, as a tiny seed of anger sprouted from a dark crevice. Where were my parents?

In a flash, I was back to 1976 and my family’s pristine split-level house — white painted brick, black shutters, lemon-yellow door. Around that time, when kids got checked in gym class for scoliosis with a simple forward bend test, our upwardly mobile nuclear family was melting down.

“You need to quit running,” said the doctor as he pressed his finger pads into my inflamed hump.

“What?” My throat constricted.

Running had saved me.

An X-ray of the author's spine taken in 2023. Courtesy of Anne Marina Pellicciotto

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During the fall of seventh grade, as I entered junior high, my father had lost another Pentagon contract and my mother’s dizzy spells kept her holed up in the blue bedroom. As the determined eldest child, I set my alarm for the crack of dawn and tiptoed out before my father awoke.

When I joined the