F is for Freak

Monday, June 07, 2010

Freak is the nickname that I gave my little sister when I was about 12 and she was 10. All those years early teen years of calling her Freak mean I still call her that today, but without it really meaning anything. In fact it never really meant anything to begin with – I think we just decided that she needed a nickname and that it should be ‘Freak’.

She’s never minded the nickname, but there was a time during her teenage years that I felt a little awkward in calling her that, and that she was a little over-sensitive to hearing it.


When my sister was 16, she was getting her dress fitted for her deb by my Nanna. When it came time to take it in a little at the back, Nanna noticed that there was something odd about the shape of Freak’s back. Her spine seemed to curve up on one side making her shoulder a little hunched. It was a pretty pronounced curve, which made it odd that no one had ever noticed it before, but I guess at 16 the only person who sees you scantily clad on a regular basis is yourself (depending what kind of 16 year old you are, I guess), and you can’t see the shape of your own spine.

A trip to the Doctor’s ensued, then a trip to the specialist, and before she knew it, Freak was scheduled for major surgery to correct Scoliosis.

Freak was opened up from the top of her back to the bottom, and they stuck about 20 grand worth of titanium rods in her to straighten up her spine. They did something tricky that they called Spinal Fusion and her before and after X-Rays ended up looking a lot like the ones you can see here.

Freak ended up with a gigantic scar down her back with little dots either side of it from the stitches or the staples or whatever it was that they used. For the next year or so, she was super paranoid about her ‘zipper’ mark, and you couldn’t mention it even in passing without her being bothered by it. On top of the zipper marks, she began to be paranoid about walking through metal detectors in case her spine set them off. Even to this day, when she travels overseas she carries a doctor’s letter with her in case she’s stopped at the metal detectors. I think her fear is that she’ll be strip-searched by an angry foreigner while they try to find some hidden metal item that they could never locate without an x-ray.


She’s 26 now and 10 years on she’s still a little sensitive about the whole subject. But the zipper mark is so faded you can barely notice it, so I don’t think the nickname is such a problem. But you can understand that during that year or two, the nickname ‘Freak’ was a little on the inappropriate/awkward side.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

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