Thursday evening, I went to an art opening at the NYU Medical School. A woman named Laura Ferguson who has suffered from scoliosis her entire life has created a gorgeous series of art pieces depicting her body. At thirteen, she went in for surgery to have her thoracic spine fused; she wore a full body cast for almost a year.
I thought of the scoliosis tests endured in grade school. Girls lined up from one end of the gym to the other, we bent over towards our toes, pulled our shirts up to the bottom of the neck, and let a stranger run his fingers the length of us, bone-by-bone to see if we were straight. Imagine the tap on the shoulder, the you need to come with us.
At the exhibit, I met a woman named Nadina LaSpina. She had a wide smile and dark hair and prosthetic legs. She sat straight-spined in the front of the room in her wheel chair. After the exhibit, we chatted, and she handed me a postcard. It was a photograph of her (looking particularly beautiful); in it, she had taken off her legs and attached them to her shoulders. Below the photograph in script was written: I'd rather wear my legs as wings.
There are days after working with students who have limited mobility that I find myself walking in tight circles in the kitchen. I walk and walk as the water brews for tea, amazed at the ability of my feet to move one in front of the other--such expectations of the body, I think, so much we take for granted--and then the tea kettle whistles, and before I know it, I am back in my mind, letting it flap wildly, feathers strewn, flapping and flapping and hardly even making it off the ground.
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