Pilates Has Saved My Life

I have been running from my body since I was diagnosed with scoliosis in the 7th grade. I grew up in Macon and we would come up to Emory a few times a year for x-rays and each time my curve was worse. But I knew that without the x-rays because the pain was getting worse. A dull, constant ache on my right side as my ribs dug in more and more to my chest cavity. I look back now and I realize that I refused to hear the doctor when he said the ultimate manifestation of the condition was death. I just thought if I could stay as thin and fit as possible, I could out run the condition, out run my body. So I had the corrective surgery the summer before my 12th grade year. It made me 2 inches taller, stopped the curve from worsening but I would still live with a curve in the severe category.

I thought I was invincible after that. I was going to be fine the rest of my life. Enter my late 30s. My body was not what it used to be. I’d had a kid. The same workouts were not serving me. The aching of my teen years was revisiting me. It set off a mild grade panic that I ignored until I couldn’t. One Sunday night as I was changing for bed I sneezed and then collapsed in pain on the floor as I was talking to my young son Paul. I still don’t know what happened. You see, when they insert titanium rods on each side of your spine they have to cut a lot of stuff. I still don’t have feeling or much sensation in most of my back. I don’t know what the sneeze shook or twisted in my body but the pain was so severe I could not move for a couple of days.

Thankfully I had found Patricia and Sam a year or so before the sneeze. Running from my body had led me to them. That little voice in my head told me I needed something, anything else to save me from my condition. Patricia and Sam have helped me stop running. I am no longer afraid of me. I have found the studio and the community to be the safe and supportive environment I needed so badly. It has been wonderful to be normal, to be among people who also have “crazy stuff going on in their body” as Patricia says. And over time it has given me the courage to face the shame of being deformed, the fear of premature death, the feeling that I am ugly, the feeling of unworthiness of my physical limitations.

I have a different philosophy for the second half of my life. I have embraced the image of my body that I had relegated to the shadows. I now embrace the joy, laughter, playfulness of living in my body. I am so deeply thankful for the mental, physical, and emotional strength I have built. I am amazed that at age 41 I am the strongest I have ever been.