Finding Your Strength

Take an active, cute, and athletic boy, about to enter high school, who skis, swims, rides, and plays tennis. And one day HE notices (not our great pediatrician and not me) that his back looks like our horses’ do when we call them “swaybacked.” How can this be?

Next thing we know they say kyphosis and bring out this awful Milwaukee brace. It’s huge, and the doctor says he must wear it for three or four years to get a good correction. If he does not, his back will continue to curve, and he will walk curled over. If he doesn’t wear the brace, there could be an operation in his future—but the operation often has lousy results. So the doctor says, “You’ve GOTTA wear the brace. Just deal with it!”

With the brace on, my son Craig’s thirty-two-inch waist is now forty inches, and his neck size is now twenty-two inches. None of his jackets fit him. He borrows his grandfather’s sports jacket and I nearly cry when he tries it on. I buy size XXL shirts for a 120-pound boy. My athletic, darling kid can’t move without looking totally awkward and frankly geek-like. All athletics are out the window for four years, and the cruelty of high school is waiting.

As they say: first you cry and then you find your strength.

We went skiing before “the brace” and then he put it on and went off to Florida for Christmas vacation. I talked to a friend who was a psychiatrist, and he gave Craig some advice: he said if people are truly kind, tell them the truth—and tell all the jerks that you hurt your back parachuting.

On vacation, we walked the beach every day for ten days. I told him how I had handled people when I lost our baby after seven months of pregnancy. I told him how proud I was of him. I talked to him about Bill Shoemaker, a friend of ours who was a great jockey and ended up paralyzed for life. We talked about how one day this would all be behind us. Keep talking, my friends—even when you think they don’t want to listen. Keep talking.

We had a good friend who was a quarterback at Brown University, a super kid about six years older than Craig who had played football with him for years on the beach. Jason tossed a ball with Craig in his brace every day of our vacation. I can’t even begin to tell you what that meant to me. He told Craig he looked like his buddies who had gotten crushed on the field, and it would all be okay.

It was hard—really hard—but my hero got through it. I could not be any more proud of my son. The doctor was great. He told me later that one of his young patients had actually committed suicide because for that child the pressures of wearing the brace had become unbearable; but Craig was able to stick it out, and the doctor was comfortable enough with Craig’s results that he took the brace off six months early. So, Craig came home from an appointment with no brace after three years—and he had gained seven inches in height.

The doctor told Craig to get the car and drive over the damn brace. I helped!