Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children was founded in 1921 in Dallas to primarily treat pediatric orthopedic conditions. Now, construction has begun on its new five-story, 345,000-square-foot campus in Frisco at the Dallas North Tollway and Lebanon Road. The new campus, which is slated to open in fall 2018, is important because about a fourth of Scottish Rite’s patients live in the north suburbs. This will make its healthcare more accessible to all children in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Flash back a decade and a half. I was about to start my freshman year of high school and was very excited about it. My mom drove me to my annual doctor’s appointment, which I didn’t think much of, until my pediatrician told me she noticed a definite curve in my spine and that I should set up an appointment at Scottish Rite—which focuses on orthopedics, among other things—to be evaluated for scoliosis.
My mom, who also had scoliosis as a teenager, took me for my initial meeting with Dr. Karl Rathjen soon after. When we walked in the building at Maple and Oak Lawn, I was primarily concerned with snagging a bag of the free popcorn they serve in the lobby, not with figuring out how to fix my back. It didn’t bother me, so I wasn’t worried. That quickly changed after I met with the doctor. I can’t remember the exact curvature degree of my spine, but he told me it was too severe not to worry about, but not severe enough for surgery. I still had several years left of growing, and if I didn’t want to end up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I had to become well-acquainted with an awkward-looking, awkward-fitting white plastic back brace called a Boston brace that wraps around the torso and tightens with Velcro straps and manually pushes your back to where your spine is supposed to be in the first place. The brace would keep my spine from curving more as I grew and would even help straighten my spine a bit in the long run. And my doctor said I would most likely need to wear this contraption for three years or until I stopped growing, through the end of my junior year of high school. My excitement for freshman year disappeared faster than the popcorn. Wearing a back brace to all my classes would be super cool and not nerdy at all. But I didn’t exactly have a choice.
Thankfully, I attended a school with uniforms, and when I had my brace on under my uniform, no one could really tell I had it on unless they tried to hug me. Then they were in for a surprise. My friends thought tapping on my “abs of steel” was comical. I wasn’t so amused at first, but I begrudgingly accepted that this was a necessary evil. I was supposed to wear the brace as many hours of the day and night as possible. I wore it to school and I slept in it. I was an athletic kid, though, so I took it off to play volleyball and lacrosse and run. I wasn’t going to give those up. Unfortunately, summer lasts most of the year in Texas, so my mom ended up washing the special tank tops I wore under it almost daily. But months passed and checkups at Scottish Rite came and went, and it became part of my normal routine.
Toward the end of my junior year, I went for my final appointment at Scottish Rite, when I was scheduled to get the all-clear to retire my brace from my wardrobe. Not only was I not hunched over, but I was standing up straighter than I did before the brace. My spine will always be slightly curved, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. Walking out of the hospital without my brace on for the first time in three years felt like committing a crime. I made sure to grab one last commemorative bag of popcorn on my way out.
Throughout the years since then, while traveling or skiing or running or doing just about anything, I’ve been reminded of that back brace that once made me cringe. It certainly doesn’t now.
