Lab Specimen

Interesting day at school today. I was not really prepared to take my shirt off in front of everyone in my nursing lab.

We were practicing musculoskeletal assessments today, so we were doing all kinds of range of motion exercises with our partners, assessing gait and looking for any kind of abnormalities. You can only practice range of motion for so long, so to kill the extra time, my partner suggested practicing checking for scoliosis. No problem there...I have great posture and have no problem being a model non-scoliosis patient. So we went behind the little curtain thing and I whipped off my shirt so she could look at my spine. When I bent over, she said, "Hmm...this side looks higher than this side. And your rib cage looks uneven." I totally thought she was joking.

Right about then one of the instructors walks in and says, "Oh, my..." I'm thinking, "Oh, crap." She palpates around and calls another instructor over and they poke around together. Before you know it, the curtain is gone, and the instructor is pointing out my problems to everyone in the class. Everyone is looking at my back, gasping and leaning forward, trying to palpate my back muscles and get an idea of what an abnormal musculoskeletal finding looks like. That was kind of an awkward moment, to which I responded by exhibiting diaphoresis (excessive sweating), making palpating me that much more fun...and by that I mean embarrassing.

In the end, the instructors diagnosed me as having one leg shorter than the other (which I suspected after doing inversions in yoga...my legs always looked uneven to me). Apparently this has caused my hips to be unequal in height, my back muscles to develop differently in order to compensate, leading to a slight side curvature in the thoracic spine and an elevated right shoulder. Great. So funny that something like this can go on and I have no idea about it. Not even an inkling. I don't walk strangely, I don't have back pain, I really do have great posture...apparently things just aren't so perfect on the inside. I'm actually kind of impressed at the body's adaptation skills.

For the rest of the day my partner, Dy, and I kept making jokes about peoples' reactions to my "deformity," we called it. People kept asking me if it hurt to walk, if I'd broken my back, if I wore special shoes, etc., like it was even a miracle to them I'd made it this far in life. We were just cracking up. We wondered if maybe I could get a handicapped parking pass out of the deal, which would be stellar because those are about the only open parking spots on campus. :)