Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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For the longest time, Anna Rakes of Botetourt County did not want to remember the years she spent wearing a plastic shell to straighten the curves in her spine.

She was a typical seventh-grader, involved in rec basketball and sensitive about her appearance.

The shell was hot and uncomfortable and its outline could be seen through her clothes.

Wearing it made her life hellish in many ways, because it made her different from her friends. She knew no one else who had to wear one.

Rakes wore that shell 23.5 hours per day for four years. She removed it to shower, and she was able to swim without it.

As she grew older and distanced herself from the experience, she realized her story might help other young people with the spinal condition scoliosis, as well as those who are different in other ways.

Change of heart

In her final year at the University of Virginia, where she earned a bachelor's degree in history and a master's in teaching, Rakes wrote a brief, self-published book called "Plastic Back."

It is aimed at young adults and is largely based on her real-life experiences, though subtle changes and altered names turned it into fiction.

Her book is a Publisher's Choice and an Editor's Choice from iUniverse, which provided editing and produces it. Those designations, she says, mean it will be available for at least 60 days this summer at Roanoke's Barnes & Noble store. It also can be ordered for $8.95 from both amazon.com and iUniverse.com.

Rakes, who will turn 23 on Sunday, is a substitute teacher in Roanoke. An interim gig, filling in for a teacher on maternity leave at Raleigh Court Elementary School, ended Tuesday.

In the summer she plans to move to Texas, where her boyfriend lives. He is a sportswriter.

The soft-cover, 42-page novelette starts with a scoliosis screening when the protagonist, Anna Beth, is a sixth-grader. An embarrassing examination by a family doctor follows, and then a visit with an orthopedist, modeled after her real orthopedist, Dr. William Mirenda, who in January left Roanoke to work in Pennsylvania.

Handled with care

In the book, Rakes writes that Anna Beth's orthopedist, whom she calls Dr. Miller, "looked like a walrus. He had a full and somewhat puffy mustache that covered all the space between his nose and mouth ... He could've used a trim. From then on I thought of him as nothing but a human likeness of a large marine animal."

But he got her name right and acted upbeat, and that eased her worries. He also diagnosed a spinal curvature severe enough to require a brace.

The story details embarrassments in gym class and at a school dance, where a classmate made fun of her.

As in real life, the brace compelled her to give up basketball and take up the piano. The story ends at her first recital.

As many as 6 million people in the United States may have scoliosis. According the Web site spineuniverse.com, it comes in three forms -- infantile, before age 3; juvenile, found more frequently in girls ages 3 to 10; and adolescent, between age 10 and maturity.

"I think scoliosis is the cruelest disease I treat," Mirenda said by phone this week, "because it strikes the most vulnerable segment of the population -- adolescent girls who oftentimes go berserk if they have a pimple on their cheek."

That group has "tremendous body image issues," he said. Scoliosis demands that they take the long view, which few have the maturity to do -- though they can develop it quickly.

Rakes underwent a full spinal fusion at the University of Virginia Medical Center after her freshman year at UVa. Her recovery took three months.

For her, scoliosis was a defining experience.

It "will make you who you are," she says.

It also increased her understanding of kids who are different.

Her battle with scoliosis may have been difficult, but, she says, "I wouldn't go back and change it."

Joe Kennedy's column appears on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.