Hi, my name is Amber, and I am 16 years old. Back in 2021, I was on holiday when my mum noticed my uneven shoulders. When we got back, we went straight to the doctors and a couple of months later I was diagnosed with a severe double curve at 50 degrees at the top and 35 degrees at the bottom. My surgeon wasn’t very worried about having surgery too soon but he knew that my curve was too severe to have a brace fitted. In the end he decided to leave it until around the summer of 2023, after my exams. 4 months later, I had a check up to see how the curve was progressing and it had increased very quickly within those four months, it was now around 70 degrees at the top and 55 degrees at the bottom. After finding out that I had a fast progressing curve, my surgeon decided that I needed to have my surgery pretty quickly.

My surgery was scheduled for three weeks late, on May 25^th 2022. In between these three weeks, I had an MRI and X-rays to give more details for the surgery. On May 25^th, I came to the hospital for my surgery and went in at around 10:00am and came out around 6:30pm. My surgeon said that the surgery went very well, and I was in hospital recovering for a week. I had around 4 weeks of school off recovering and came back around the end of June 2022.  During the first couple weeks of my recovery, I noticed a bump on my right shoulder but figured it was nothing due to me just having my surgery. However during the first 6 months of recovery, it kept increasing in size and was becoming uncomfortable and sore to touch or lean on. At 6 months post-op, we ended up going back to my surgeon to figure out what was causing it and if anything could be done. After more X-rays and a CT, we found that the metal work from the fusion had started to come loose at the top, around 1cm out. Unfortunately my surgeon said that I would have to have another surgery to fix the metal work as it was causing a lot of discomfort. I had my surgery date for January 4^th 2023. During this surgery, my surgeon took some samples to try and figure out what was causing this and found that I had a bacterial infection, causing the metal work to come out, so I was put on antibiotics for 6 months. During my recovery I also had an infected wound due to the stitch knots irritating my skin, which meant I had to keep having a cover on my wound and having to go into hospital to have it continually checked on and cleaned for a couple of weeks. After my course of antibiotics are finished, I should be finished with my recovery and journey. I have since gone back to horse riding and sports at school and am now healing well. My curve now is estimated between 10-20 degrees after surgery.