Bracing before and after harrington Rod surgery

[Guest guest]

Dear Gals,

I had my Harrington Rod surgery in 1973, at UCSF, in San Francisco. I had no streaching, frames, or casts, before or after surgery. I had no bracing prior to surgery, my curves were found far too late for that, I was a foster kid, and truly no one paid attention till my curves were soooo big you couldn't help but see them. We were going to go with our local doc in Santa Ca, with the casts etc, till he said he had a friend who did the surgery at UCSF, with Harrington Rods and bracing afterwards. From Diagnosis till surgery took nearly a year with my curves increasing, because Medi-Cal in California deamed my condition non-life threatening and wouldn't pay for the surgery, so my foster Mom set out to find funding with private groups, and Chrippled Children's group paid for it. So my story is hugely different from those of my time, lucky, you bet, because I didn't face a lot of the torturous stuff you guys talk about. I had the surgery, it was awful, and remember waiting for what seemed forever in awful pain for those pain shots in my thighs. They had to keep in in a perfect line in bed or I'd scream bloody murder from the pain( mind you no cast to keep me that way). At ten days post op they got me up to do the cast that would be the form to make my brace. Two interns and a brace guy used a tip table, stood me up, and they wrapped me in plaster, it got sooooo hot they had to use a little hammer type thing at the base of the back of my head to keep me from passing out. The whole time of course I'm naked as a jaybird, and of course on my period, complete with those lovely pad holders of the day, and due to the lightheadedness, telling the interns just how cute I thought they were. I look back on it and am mortified in about a hundred ways. I got my brace in a few days and was up walking. The brace was very similar to the TLSO of today, except it was very hard plastic, and rubbed awfully, I still have scars on my hips and chest from it. I was in the hospital for a month, went home for two weeks and was back to school. Wore the brace six months, and with much ceremony through it over the edge at the dump, and watched a bulldozer run over it. So there are people from the 70's that didn't have all that terrible stuff done to them, I was lucky to be where I was in 1973, at a learning hospital, where I guess they were on the cutting age of care for the time.