spinal fusion

And Now a Brief Word from Josephine, the Scar That Runs All the Way Down My Back

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment
FED UP TM Ideas worth ranting about
Hey! Here in the back. ScarJo here. I’m FED UP with the lack of respect, okay?

Look, I’m a long, faintly pink line that starts just the above the shoulder blades and ends above the ass-crack. Yeah I’m real sorry about offending your delicate sensibilities. I moved in when my landlady was about 13 and had had a spinal fusion cause her scoliosis was out. of. control. Whereas I held things together.

I was a lot more colorful in those days. A lot more sensitive. Cut nerves I can handle though. But I’m supposed to accept I’m shameful? I’m not exactly blaming my landlady, who was a teenager at the time, for trying to find bathing suits and a prom dress that would hide as much of me as possible. She was a new driver still looking for an unmarked exit off the Bullshit Highway.

“Would you prefer unblemished and dead?”

Remember, all I am is a pink line, with the tiniest smidge of a ridge, on a person’s back. We’re not talking about a sucking chest wound. Or pus. Or whatever’s wrong with Steve Bannon’s complexion. I’m not asking to be a big deal, I’m not asking for attention, for cripes sakes. It’d just be nice to get out and get some freaking fresh air once in a while, you know?

But nooooooo, I’m a SCAR and I must be hidden. Continue reading →

I Remember This: I Am Thirteen and in the Recovery Room After Spinal Fusion Surgery

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
Cover of Mythology by Edith HamiltonYou are flat on your back under a glaring light. The bed is hard. It hurts. You don’t move because it doesn’t occur to you to do so, it’s so far beyond you. Each part of you that registers – reports in, so to speak – registers through pain. You body is mapped as a topography of pain. No face or distinguishing characteristics. You are a ground-colored shape dotted with points of glaring, popping pain. Where your head aches on the stone-stab mattress, where the gravel of the sheet is under your arms, where it rasps all along the tube that snakes down your throat, to an unidentifiable pressure on your front, low down.
Your back. Oh. Your back is a barely contained thorn patch in a mad stabber’s arsenal.
You’re not alone. There are voices, professional ones. But no one is talking to you.
There is a nurse above you, meeting your eyes. Her head blocks the light. “You’re awake,” she says. “You’re in the recovery room.”
You make a sound. It sounds dreadful. The first sound Frankenstein made on his slab. The thought of the monster brings back your past, all there was before this light, this slab, this pain. And the face in your reunion with memory itself is: Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.
Continue reading →