I Was A Scoliosis Cast Model
A Price Of A Wish Story
I needed extra credit to keep my grade point average up to the level my parents expected. There were a couple of subjects that I do not do so well on, but I only needed to take as a basic course requirement for collage. As far as I was concerned I would never need them once I got out into the ‘real world’.
Thankfully the school I was attending at the time did not care where the points came from, or if they were in any way related to your major or not. In that way I had been volunteering each year with a professor who was teaching a course I never studied under. He needed a model to use and I fit the requirements he was looking for.
I’ve never been big or well filled out, remaining short and thin all my life. To be perfectly honest, I was behind all of my peers physically at every turn. I got called ‘waifish’ a lot as I was growing up. But hey, it got me a nice gig for two years that garnered me the extra credit points I needed. And I’d get paid a bit of a stipend as well which didn’t hurt.
Being small and limber, the professor could put me in front of his students and use me as a model for ‘child developmental issues’. Or more specifically, childhood scoliosis. His course was on adolescent orthopedics and I got to be his living cast model.
He’d have me lying on a casting table covered by a blanket with nothing more than stockinette covering my little body underneath. The instructional demonstration would begin and I’d be placed onto a casting frame then bent and twisted into the historical shape he wanted to instruct his students on.
Since this was to be more of a demo of past methods, the casts in question were no longer being used these days, he wanted to use me for an entire week each semester when he taught the course in question. I’d be placed in an old style scoliosis cast and kept in the clinic for the students to take care of.
And seeing as the mock patient was intended to be a child, and what child wanted to get placed into a huge and debilitating cast, I was free to act up and resist as much as I wanted. He’d treat me just like a child in that situation and if necessary He’d drug me with an anesthetic to calm me down and make me more pliant. Then I’d get to be difficult with the students for the entire week as I complained about being in my cast. I had fun the first two years being a real brat, and both times the professor has to stab me with a needle and inject me with something so he could put the cast on.
Obviously if I was to stay in the cast for a week then I couldn’t wear anything underneath the cast when he was putting it on. I didn’t have any issues with that personally. One, this was a medical school and these were medical students. Of course they’d be seeing patients who were put into revealing positions and couldn’t help ‘baring all’. And two, I have to admit I have some latent exhibitionist tendencies in me so I enjoyed tickling that fancy from time to time. And let’s be honest, my breasts were barely better than an full A-cup at best. Wrapping those up in a cast left me looking practically flat-chested. As far as my lower genitals went, I didn’t feel much need to shave the peach fuzz I had going on down there. It looked prepubescent enough just the way it was.
If I had only known what was coming. Nobody could have predicted the huge change that was going to happen my Junior year.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Right on schedule, the Professor started looking for a cast model and I was right there to happily volunteer. I was duly informed that this year he wanted to do one of the largest scoliosis casts that he’d done in a while and would mean that I’d be able to move even less of myself once I was in it. I said I had no problems with that as it would only be a week in any case. (boy was I wrong) I’d get to be served basically hand and foot, get extra credits, and get paid on top of that. Win-win-win as far as I was concerned.
I showed up at the appointed time, stripped down and got into the stockinette shirt and pants, and covered up with a blanket on the exam table for him. As usual, I waited for the class to get seated, and for his lecture to get started, before I began to get ‘rambunctious’. I started out small with simply complaining that I didn’t want a cast once he got to describing what was going to happen and the type of cast I was going to be put in.
It wasn’t until he and his assistants got me moved over to the casting frame and tried to get me into the position that was ‘required’ for my treatment that I began trying to obstruct them by moving out of place, or get away, or even hit them. Once the hitting started the professor brought out the syringe full of drugs.
They had managed to get an IV line into the back of my hand after about five tries at the start of the demonstration, so that was used to inject the classic ‘sleepy milk’ into me which would be followed by a paralytic since they had to get me into a rather severe position this time. That also meant that they’d have to intubate me with the drugs being used and put me on a ventilator to keep me breathing. The Propofol went in once they captured my hand – I kept waving it around just to be difficult – and I was quickly slumped over and nearly unresponsive. He didn’t want to fully put me under, just enough to make me easy to manage for later when he needed me to be able to respond.
They turned me around and tilted my head back to the right position so the ET tube could be inserted down into my airway. I didn’t expect that, I was still awake enough that I knew what was going on around me and could feel what was going on. My attempts at struggling were so feeble at that point that I don’t think anybody even noticed me complaining or trying to tell them I was still awake.
The curved metal tongue depressor with the light on the end went down into my throat quickly followed by the tube that I’d soon be breathing through. The end of the tube slid all the way in past my vocal cords and the balloon on the end got inflated cutting off my ability to inhale any air through anything other than the tube itself. The outer end got secured to my face with several strips of tape, and finally the paralytic drug got injected into me.
In minutes I was fully paralyzed and unable to move or even breathe on my own anymore. The ventilator had been turned on immediately after the drug entered my system so a machine was now in charge of my air intake and exhalation. With my body now fully under their control they got me bent and twisted into the shape they wanted me and the casting began in earnest.
They started by placing my in traction with a harness around my head and waist pulling in opposite directions to stretch my spine as much as possible. While the traction did its job on me, rolls of cotton cast padding got applied to both legs, both arms, my entire torso, and my head. I quickly realized that this was going to be a monster of a cast, and because it was for old style scoliosis treatment is was going probably be super thick in the end as well. The plaster began to wrap around my limbs and body soon enough.
My left leg was held semi stretched out with a moderate bend at my knee and my foot in a relaxed pointed position. My left hip was bent up at what felt like a steep angle to me. My right leg on the other hand had the foot pointed down quite far, but still remaining comfortable and not pointed straight down. The right knee got bent at better than a ninety degree angle with my right hip getting bent up even steeper than the left and rotated outwards.
The position of my legs just felt wrong and did not make sense to me at first, until I began thinking in a full three sixty degrees on all axis. If I were to be rolled over onto my left side, for example, then my legs would be in the perfect position to support me with my right toes providing the contact point on the bed to keep me up on my side. My right toes would be touching down on the bed slightly behind me with my right knee sticking up in the air and my left leg laying flat on the bed in a gentle curve around my right foot as a stabilizing platform.
My right arm was allowed to hang down behind me then pulled inwards so my hand was more or less pointing diagonally towards my left hip. Again, another move to have a rigid support behind me to stop me from rolling off my left side if you think of me lying on my left side.
For my torso I got bent sideways to my right with my shoulders turned clockwise so my right shoulder wound up pointing diagonally away from me towards the rear, thereby extending the reach of my right hand. My left arm got placed into an almost classic shoulder spica position with my upper arm held straight out to my side at shoulder level and my left forearm pointing straight ahead of me and becoming the flat surface my upper body would rest on.
Not forgetting my head, he bent my neck to the right side so when I got placed on my left then my head would be closer to being positioned in an almost normal upright pose. A student asked about the extreme position I was being placed into, and the Professor explained that while normally the child would be slowly bent into the correct position over several days to a week using cast wedging and extension techniques, they only had me for a week total. Therefore he wanted to get me into my final position now instead of trying to slowly bend me the usual way. And seeing as how I was currently completely paralyzed and naturally quite flexible, they were having no problems with getting my body where he wanted it.
The plastering and forced positioning of my body continued unabated for well over an hour, going quite a bit past that time limit. The worst of it for me was getting my torso into the extreme bend he wanted then pushing my head sideways to an almost normal upright position. While I was sure that I’d be feeling the other oddly placed limbs in due course, the strain he was putting on my sides and neck were already beginning to cause complaints. I think he noticed something was up as he shoved some more drugs into me during the casting procedure. I’m pretty sure it was muscle relaxers from how I went back to being fully limp again soon after the drug hit my system. Of course it could also have been more of the paralytic. Either way it forced my muscles to relax which is what I needed to relieve most of the discomfort right then.
By the time they were done I had a cast on me that covered my entire body from head to toe. The toes on my left foot were thankfully left sticking out of the cast, unlike my right toes that got completely encased. The fingers and wrist of my right had were extended out straight and also fully encased in the cast with no opening just like my right toes. The fingers of my left hand were all free of the cast, but there was not much they were going to do with even my left wrist being held immobile in plaster. As I’ve already explained, my torso was bent severely over to my right and held there, with my neck following suit in a similar bend. My head was encased by nearly eighty or ninety percent. There was a hole at the top letting my hair spill out some, and I had a window in the plaster exposing my face from the eyebrows to the bottom lip and the outside corner of one eye to the outside corner of the other eye. My ears were completely buried under the plaster which made hearing very difficult.
The thickness of the cast was incredible. To ‘properly support’ the cast in that position they had incorporated several wooden dowels in it. One ran from my right thigh near my knee straight over to the side of my head. A second dowel started from the inside of my left calf up next to the knee and terminated on the inside of my right calf in the same place up next to that knee. The third dowel, and mind you these things were inch and a half thick pieces of wood, went between the front of my chest over to the inside of my left forearm to give extra support there with holding up my cast. I never saw it, but I was told a fourth dowel got placed between my back and right forearm as well.
Of course to get all of this in place, arms, legs, head, and wooden rods, they had to use extra sheets and rolls of plaster to hold everything tight and secure. I could see just how thick the cast was around the opening in it for my face, and to me it looked like it was two or three inches thick around my head. They even went so far as to cut out a section of the cast after it got finished then plastered back over the opening they created to simulate how the cast would look if they had slowly bent me over a week then solidified the cast. There were even hand made, curved bars of thick plaster that got stuck in place to strengthen the cast around the cut and re-plastered sections.
Thank god they somehow managed to leave an opening down below to take care of my waste output and ‘womanly needs’, although by the time they were done the thickness of the plaster made it almost impossible for me to pee into anything other than a diaper, and that would leak due to the odd position they had me in up on my left side.
They did start with trying a diaper on me of course. A smaller size baby diaper would get shoved up inside the cast with a larger adult diaper (the only thing that would fit around the huge cast) taped around the outside. When I had to pee the diaper would start to catch it, but then fail to contain the pee well enough before it could get absorbed. The solution was to insert a urinary catheter since there was no way to get any type of cup or bucket close enough to my genitals.
The back end was just as difficult to deal with, I couldn’t lie on a bedpan or sit on a toilet in my position, and again trying to put a bucket up in there to catch anything was not doable. There was little they could do about it outside of keeping me diapered and checking my status frequently. They did start giving me regular enemas to clean me out as much as possible, but it was still tricky. The best solution was to try and get my body on a regular BM routine like a person who had been permanently paralyzed, and use a plastic sheet stuck up inside of the cast to let everything slide out down to a bucket and keep the diapers in place for the rest of the time.
Initially they did not think that neither they nor I would need to worry about my monthly cycle, however the incident that took place only two days into the week that I was supposed to remain in my cast changed everything.
When the wave of change rolled through my area it was quite late into the night. Nobody noticed anything at all. My cast was huge and solid but still drying out. Come morning time and my daily routine hardly changed. Rumors were only just starting to spread about casts not being able to come off until the injury fully healed. It took until three days later on my fifth day out of seven before anyone actually tried something or really noticed any difference in my giant cast.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
The professor walked into my room at the clinic and stood there looking at me. Or more specifically, my cast. I couldn’t say anything to ask him what was up. With the extreme stress they had placed my chest under, my breathing was heavily compromised. I had continued to experience trouble breathing even after the drugs had worn off so I still had the ET tube in my throat with the ventilator running in a strong assist mode to help me breathe better. With the ET tube filling up my mouth they had to shove a feeding tube up my nose, through my sinuses, down the back of my throat, and ending in my stomach so they could still feed me, albeit with a liquid diet.
Finally he chose to speak to me, and I will never forget his words that day.
“There are strange things happening in the world. Rumors that everyone thought to be simply fantasy and impossible to happen are possibly turning out to be true. I don’t know if I believe them myself, but I am starting to see the possibility looking at your cast. There’s something subtly different about it that I just can’t put my finger on.
“Were going to run a little test here and see what happens, if any little part of this is somehow true, then I’m afraid that you are not going to appreciate what I’m about to do.”
Stepping out into the hallway I can hear him call out.
“Nurse, bring those supplies I asked for and let’s get this test going. I want to either discount these rumors or, god forbid, prove them true once and for all.”
Returning into my room he waits patiently until a nurse enters carrying several items and dragging a cast saw with her. Setting the packages out on the rolling table everything gets setup to the Professor’s liking (he is an actual doctor after all) and the cast saw is plugged into the wall for power.
Turning on the cast saw he says, “Here we go.”
The blade bites into the plaster shell over my neck and digs deep. The blade is fresh and it takes little time before he has the lines for a window cut in the cast. Taking the cast spreaders he is able to just barely wedge the end into the cut and pry the corner up a centimeter. Grabbing at the corner he holds it up and pries the rectangular block up a little more giving him a better grip on it. Wiggling the loose piece around he is able to remove it creating a window where he can cut away the cotton padding and stockinette below to expose my neck.
It takes only seconds for my skin to feel fresh air blow across my neck and I wonder what it is he is trying to do. Standing there staring again he seems to be waiting for something. After a short moment he shrugs and takes up a syringe with a needle on the end. The sharp point stabs me in the neck not once, not twice, but several times and in several places. A few minutes later I realize he is numbing my neck for something when the feeling fades away from the part that has been exposed.
I’ve already said that I am not in the medical track of study here, so I still had no clue what this man was about to do. When he picked up a scalpel and approached my neck with it I was completely terrified. I thought he was about to cut my throat and kill me. I had only one part of that right. He was about to cut into my neck, but it was not to kill me and dump my heavy encased body in some forgotten lake some where.
With actual care he cut into my flesh at a predetermined place and parts the skin on my neck with a vertical incision. The nurse is quick to apply pressure to the wound and stop any bleeding that happens. It takes a moment then he cuts deeper and around something while she holds the cut open for him. I see something off-yellow in color get taken out of my neck and a moment later there’s a wisp of smoke that drifts up from my neck.
I can tell he goes even deeper as the nurse is doing double duty with trying to suction up any blood or fluids that well up and trying to hold the incision open at the same time so the professor can keep working. The work is slowed because there is only the two of them until finally a second nurse show up to help the first nurse keep thing progressing smoothly. Lucky me.
Thankfully whatever drug he used to inject me is keeping me numb and I don’t feel anything that he is doing. I am still terrified by what he is doing, but I can’t feel any pain from it and I haven’t died – yet. One thing gets pointed out that stops everyone in their tracks.
Just about the time the second nurse shows up the first one stops and points with wide eyes and whispers “Look.”
“I’ll be damned,” the doctor cusses. “It’s real, isn’t it.”
“You- You just tore open the cotton then cut the stockinette and left it laying there to gain access through the cast. Now look at it,” the nurse manages to get out.
“There’s a properly sized and finished window through the cast exposing the area for the tracheostomy that I’m working on giving you. I didn’t finish the cast off, and that plaster now sealing the padding and stockinette in place is fully dry. Amazing.”
He goes back to cutting through my neck, but I can still see his eyes flicker back and forth between what he is doing and the edges of the cast window that has been created. As he goes deeper and deeper the professor is pausing his cutting and using sutures to tie off things in my neck, but with no explanations being given I have no idea what he is suturing.
At some predetermined point the balloon on the end of the ET tube is deflated and the tube is pulled up out of my throat about two inches and stops. Suddenly, with what seems to be a very deep cut, I can hear my breaths whistling in and out through the hole he’s been cutting. He switches to what looks to me like a heavy pair of scissors and I can actually feel a small jolt as he cuts through something tough in my neck – twice. More sutures go in several places and he stands up straighter to look at his work. He shoves his finger into my neck, I assume to check his work, and he nods.
One of the nurses hands him something white and curved which he shoves down into the hole while the ET tube is fully removed. I can feel the end of it sitting somewhere in my throat then with just air from an empty syringe I feel something expand inside my neck which completely blocks off any room for air to get around this thing. I guess it’s some sort of tube because I can still breathe through something down there, just no air can get through my nose or mouth anymore. It’s just like the ET tube, but it looked to have been much smaller and is now sitting in a hole that got created lower down on my neck. The hose to the ventilator gets switched over to the end of this thing in my neck and I’m back to breathing the same way as I have been since being put into this monster cast.
“I have just finished performing what is called a tracheotomy,” the professor is looking at me as he finally explains what he did.
“That procedure creates what is called a tracheostomy, basically a hole through your neck and into your trachea, or windpipe. Once the opening, or stoma, is created then a tube called a tracheostomy tube is inserted that you’ll breathe through from now on.
“You will probably hear the students and nurses call your opening and the tube either a trach tube for short or just trach for either the tube or hole. I have done this primarily because a patient who needs ventilator support for more than a week or so will have their ET tube switched out for a trach tube as regular procedure.
“I also did it as a test to see if the rumors are true that casts have taken on something of a life of their own now. The cast window I created so I could insert your trach has self repaired, all on its own, and is a properly finished opening now. Looking over your cast I can see now where, what I would call blemishes, have smoothed out. Wrinkles and rough spots that I know were there the last time I came in, things that were already set in stone so to speak, are gone. I am going to check around your perineal opening to see how that looks too.”
Taking off my two diapers they all get a good look and one nurse makes a remark about how the little stains from leaks on both ends have disappeared. The professor shakes his head and reaches for the cast saw again. While the second nurse begins to clean up the trash and equipment that was used the saw is turned on and he presses it down into the cast. I’m pretty sure I can see dry plaster dust flying out as it quickly cuts through since it was a fresh saw blade. He keeps this up for a minute making what looks like a cut line up over my belly.
When the first nurse who is standing around watching the professor work taps him on the shoulder and points back to where he started cutting he stops to look. The two of them apparently watch something happening as I can see their expressions go from what I think is doubtful, to incredulous, and finally resigned.
“I have some bad news for you,” the professor tells me. “The rumors appear to be accurate and true. Casts that get applied have gained the ability to self repair from any damage. Any scrape, cut, stain, crack, or attempt at removal is simply reversed or fixed within minutes of occurring.
“The cut I just tried to make through your cast has completely fixed itself. It’s like the cut was never there and your cast is whole and solid. To be honest, your cast is actually looking better now than it did when we finished applying it. Unfortunately this has some major implications and leaves us with a whole slew of unanswered questions.
“And it also creates some major concerns with you too that we are going to have to figure out. I don’t know what else to tell you right now, other than we are going to figure this out. I’m certain the whole medical profession is going to be looking into this bizarre phenomenon. Once we have something more to report, someone will let you know.”
With those words, the professor walked out of my room and I never saw him again. By the days end I was moved out of the clinic and transported over to the local hospital proper. My care and feeding were taken over by the medical teams working in the orthopedic ward. I heard they hired extra staff to work the ortho floor due to the event just to be able to handle all the patients with casts that came in and couldn’t get them off.
I suppose that it goes without saying that there was an immediate moratorium on putting anybody into a new cast once the word got out among medical centers. With having no apparent way to cut a cast off, they were definitely not going to put anyone into a new one. That lasted only about two or three weeks though. It took that long for someone to first come in who was scheduled to have their cast removed and it worked, and then for doctors to verify it could still be done with several more patients who were at the end of their term of required immobilization with a cast for healing.
Once they were sure that a cast could be removed after the patients injury had healed then casts came back into use, if a bit slowly at first and with not a little bit of trepidation. They even learned that they didn’t have to create the entire cast from start to finish. Someone managed to figure out that a small finished cast, or even just a finished band of cast material, placed over the injury sight would grow on its own up to the proper size to immobilize the injured body part the way it needed to be held. A cast could be applied and it would self repair for as long as the injury was healing, and once healed the cast would stop repairing and it could be cut off again.
This is where I got a nasty surprise.
I was put into a cast intended for scoliosis treatment. And my cast was behaving just like every other cast out there and repairing itself. My cast remained perfect and unblemished. Well, for the most part. People could still sign a persons cast and the writing would not fade away or disappear. I guess an intentional signature was not considered the same as a stain. Although, there were one or two signatures that I collected that I didn’t like or want and they quickly vanished like they never happened.
But I digress. I am stuck in my cast just like everybody else, and my cast is technically for scoliosis treatment. A treatment that used to last as long as a year; and up to five years in some cases.
Let me say that again. Up. To. Five. Years.
I can’t move, can’t breathe properly on my own, can’t feed myself, can’t use the bathroom on my own, nothing. I have no power over my life in this cast, and I have no way of knowing how long I am going to remain in it.
It has only been three months so far, and every test to see if I can get out has failed. From what I can tell I’m looking at a minimum of nine more months in this thick monster of a plaster shell that won’t let me move. And the dumb thing actually got bigger, too. A month ago I was being moved around to change my bed sheets. This thing has got to weigh a hundred pounds if it’s an ounce, so I’m not all that easy to move. The nurse and orderly who were taking care of the task were not exactly careful and the fingers of my left hand got bent back too far and twisted some. I swear I felt something break, but they said it was fine and didn’t report it. Didn’t want to get in trouble is what they were trying to do. But it came back to bite both them and me in the butt.
I was worried that the damage to my fingers would not heal properly, and I worried that they’d do the same to my remaining exposed toes too the next time they showed up. By the next morning the cast on my arm and hand had grown and expanded further to fully enclose the rest of my fingers so all ten are now fully hidden. All ten of my toes are protected inside of my cast too. The plaster down on my left foot had also grown and enclosed the rest of my toes down there as well.
I’m sure it added on several more pounds to the cast, but I’m fully protected from just about any harm now so that’s the apparent trade off. Not sure if it’s a good or bad trade though. The nurse who came in that morning took note of the changes and using twenty questions got an answer out of me about what had happened. They got in trouble for not being careful and for trying to hide it. Makes no difference to my care, but at least they got a good reaming out for it.
So there it is. Here I lay, stuck. Staring down a tunnel that could end as soon as nine months, which is what I am hoping for. What scares the crap out of me every night as I lie wide awake in my bed, is that this is going to last for the next nine months and four years. I know what the doctors and nurses keep trying to tell me about keeping a positive attitude, but down deep in my heart I am afraid that I won’t be seeing the outside of a hospital for a very long time.
