By RIA REDULLA
Illustrated By REG BAUTISTA

Discussed: High school, Puberty, Life with a Back Brace, Michele Weinberger is my Hero

Puberty is a cruel time to be a female. Skin breaks out, mini-boobs sprout out from nowhere, hair grows in weird places, hormones give you funny feelings for boys, and don’t even get me started on menstruation. The period of adolescence probably multiplies the female’s normal amount of insecurity and self-consciousness by a million.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s awkward. It’s incredibly inelegant.

And in my case, it was a little more interesting.

Case in point:

GASP!

That, my friends, is the contraption I had to wear for two-and-a-half years in my early teens.

In early 1998, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, meaning my spine was curved like a letter S. My condition was especially bad since my spine wasn’t just curved, it was also twisting the way you wring a wet towel. The doctor left me with two choices. It was either “forget the brace but get tortured with back pains for the rest of your life” or “cure your condition but lose your dignity”.

Talk about a huge decision for a kid. At an age like that, all you really want is to fit in with your friends. But considering that I was an 89-pound toothpick with frizzy hair and braces on my teeth, it was a little too late for that already.

When you’re thirteen years old, every bad situation tends to feel bigger than it actually is. For example, a tiny zit on your nose – the kind that nobody even notices unless you point it out – feels like the a mountain. So when I was thirteen, having to wear a back brace seemed like a fate worse than death. But as the cliché goes, things aren’t always what they seem.

Over those two years, I got jokes from the funniest to the downright lame (What’s Ria’s favorite kind of music? METAL! *tatug-PSSH!*). So far, the best one I heard was in my sophomore year and it remains etched in my memory. During one lunch break, I was about to cross the street from my school and a nearby tricycle driver suddenly talked to me. “Inday, strict ba ang mga magulang mo?”

I thought, okay, that’s a weird thing to ask a stranger. “Ha? Bakit ba, manong?” I replied anyway.

His reply was one of the funniest wisecracks I’ve ever heard about my condition. Half-chuckling and with a teasing grin, he said, “Kasi kinulong na ang bibig mo, kinulong pa ang katawan mo.”

At first, I had no idea whether to laugh out loud saying “Onga noh!” or to get irritated because this stranger was making fun of me. Sure, it was only natural that people made jokes about the brace. How could you not? I was a walking poofy-haired twig who had more metal than Slayer and Anthrax combined. I earned nicknames like BBG (Back Brace Girl) and Choke Slam from my friends. And so, I decided to let the man have his fun and to be a good sport about it.

Ironically, I wasn’t totally deprived of normalcy when I had the brace. I had friends, I still danced when I wanted to, and I also discovered that the cliché of the back brace girls moving like stiff robots is completely exaggerated in the movies. Save for having to carry a metal prison from chin to hips, life was still sort of normal for me.

And then, there was S – the first boy I ever had any real feelings for. I didn’t have boyfriends in high school, but S was my one and only “ka-M.U.” then. He was my batch’s crush ng bayan and I was the back brace girl. Jake Ryan and Samantha Baker could kiss our love story’s ass. Ironically, I don’t remember much of what happened on the night S sort of confessed his feelings to me, but there is one fragment that I do recall vividly.

Somewhere between discussing Starcraft and his declaration of admiration, he wrapped his arms around my hard plastered waist and pulled me close. With the metal pressed to his chest, he told me, “You know, you’re really pretty.” When you’re thirteen and a boy tells you that you’re pretty, your head instantly floods with screaming and scribble notes of “S & R 4EVA”. Yet despite my face heating up with kilig, I rolled my eyes, giggled and coolly said, “Whatever.” It didn’t work out after we lost touch during summer vacation, but looking back, I give props to this boy just for the fact that he didn’t find it strange to like the back brace girl even though he was the cutest guy in the Class of 2003.

You see, generally, things weren’t at all like the movies. While Hollywood was telling me that I was going to be at the bottom of the high school food chain, real life showed me the contrary. Making friends was actually easy and people didn’t seem to associate the brace with “loser”. Aside from Intramurals where I had to sit at the sidelines instead of playing out in the field, I never really had to feel sorry for myself.

Maybe that’s the big punchline – that my life with the brace wasn’t as I bad as I thought it would be. Sure, I got picked on, but the jokes were never cruel and I never really took them personally. What made the difference between me and the movie characters is that I never felt like I was an outcast because of the brace. Aside from me getting stared at in public places, people were pretty much normal about it. Or maybe the real difference was just that the kids in my high school weren’t complete assholes.

The only things that really bothered me about the brace were purely physical. It dug into my skin a lot and gave me bruises that lasted for years. It also forced me out of wearing the clothes I wanted and tore holes in the ones I had to wear. While my friends were graduating to tank tops and cute blouses, I was still stuck wearing overalls and holey oversized shirts. Worst of all, I had to wear the damned thing twenty-three hours a day, leaving me with only an hour for bathing. Emotionally, it wasn’t that bad, but physically, it was torture. The back brace was no piece of cake and I swear, anybody giving me a hard time for it would have literally tasted some steel.

The prescribed time of wearing the brace was finished by the time I hit junior year. My fears of having to go to prom night as Choke Slam were gone. As I went back to my metal-free life, I started to appreciate the mundane things I had always taken for granted, like the simple luxury of being able to feel my bed on my back when I slept. It gave me memories not many people can experience. I clearly recall the day my mom let me cut class and took me out swimming all day when my brace had to be adjusted because I grew a couple of inches. It was a very humbling experience that taught me the value of patience, endurance, and carefree, painless body movement.

My doctor told me that most girls don’t finish the prescribed wearing time or choose not to wear the brace at all. It might have cramped my style, but the brace was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. I’m proud to have survived it. My 13-year-old self never would have seen it this way, but it really wasn’t all that bad.

Over time, I’ve come across several scoliotic girls who worry about having to wear it during their high school years. I don’t blame them. What already-insecure teenage girl wants to put herself in a steel body cage? Yet I have always encouraged them to go through with it. Because of the brace, I turned out to be a stronger person with higher tolerance for pain and inconvenience. I trained myself to roll with the punches and take whatever life had to give me. Most of all, I learned to set aside my prejudice for people who appear to be different.

Take it from a survivor: the brace served its purpose for curing a bad back, but I say it did so much more than that.

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Ria Redulla is a hyperactive, curly-haired Cebuana with a bottomless pit for a stomach. A typical island girl, she is determined to live by the beach someday. She believes in God, love, and saving the environment. Her current affairs include wandering around in her VW bug and hosting a music show on a local TV channel in Cebu. She blogs here.

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Regina Bautista recently abandoned a cozy corporate day job, churning out puns for an ad agency, to write and draw her life in comic book form.  Rough drafts of ruminations on her daily existence can be found here. In case it hasn’t become dead obvious at this point, she loves comics.

In the little free time she has, she can be found baking and macking on cupcakes (usually in that order). They also happen to be delicious cupcakes.