The Doctors – Scoliosis Patient Undergoes Life Changing Surgery

Our next guest struggled with a scoliosis curvature that was the worst case her world-renowned doctor had ever seen. This is a Dora’s story.

When I was 11 years old, I was diagnosed with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. It’s basically a curve in my spine. My parents were told that I could either die during surgery or I could be paralyzed for the rest of my life, and they didn’t want to put me in that situation. Round 15, I really started to feel insecure about my condition. It brings tears to my eyes. I felt like everybody knew, and I spent all this time, you know, trying to hide it from everybody in the world. It was just tough enough being a teenager.

Over the next few years, I went to see several doctors, and the story just basically remained the same: come back, come back, we don’t need to do this right now. It just got old. So two years ago, I ran across Dr. Melamed. He said this is a huge issue and we need to fix it right away. I had a two-part surgery. With the first surgery, he corrected the curve and then he secured it with temporary rods. The second surgery was a week later, and he put permanent rods.

After the second surgery, I woke up, I’m wiggling my toes, I’m making sure everything is still working. And it was, standing up for the first time was a shock. Four inches taller, so I feel like a giant. Dr. Melamed, I can’t thank him enough for what he did for me.

Dora joins us now with her doctor, board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Hooman Melamed. Thank you both for being here.

Thank you very much for [inaudible]. Good to see you.

So Adora, you had an extremely intense, complicated, long surgery. We need to know, how are you doing today?

I’m doing quite well. My surgery was back in February, so I’m six months post-op at this point. And, you know, I’m still navigating, trying to figure things out, but for the most part I’m doing really well. I’m in physical therapy twice a week, and it’s just amazing, you know, how I’m progressing, and just every day I’ll level up and I can do more things than I could do yesterday.

Dr. Melamed, I’d like to ask you, you know, to talk to us a little bit about why this surgery was so important for Dory to have.

Yeah, this is what makes it very unique about this case, because now in the United States we rarely see adults with curves that are over 100 degrees. You know, her curve was, you know, we’re talking about 115 degree curve. So here’s actually, this is [inaudible] model. This is a three-dimensional model of her spine that I have made to prepare for the surgery, and you can see how, how complicated the model is.

And as I said, it’s very rare, and this was very challenging because it was a, you know, high risk of catastrophic neurological injury. And also her already lung capacity was affected significantly, you know. And if the curve would have progressed more, it would have continued basically compromising and squeezing her lung, and was already squeezing her heart. And I was very worried that, God, probably if she were to get COVID, she doesn’t have the lung capacity to fight and recover, and, you know, it’s just a life going down the hill after that.