Kalycia Urquhart was seven when she was diagnosed with an extra vertebra. It all began when she bent over to pick up her baby brother who had just begun to crawl. Something in her neck tweaked causing an excruciating amount of pain and she couldn’t move. “I first got put into traction in hospital by a specialist,” she says. “They put weights on a pulley system in an attempt to stretch my neck out. I was in hospital for about two weeks in this contraption and it was the worst possible thing that could have been done as they were putting weights on a bone that was fused to other bones.”
Urquhart was in pain, but the doctors didn’t understand exactly what was going on. It was only after Urquhart’s mother found a neurosurgeon, an expert in spinal osteoporosis anomalies, who x-rayed her at a specific angle and exposed an extra vertebra.
It was an extremely rare condition, she was one in the 600,000 people born with a spinal anomaly and at that point, the only person with her condition in the world.
“It was quite an ordeal. It took us a very long time to get an actual diagnosis because no one could see what was wrong with me or find the issue,” she says. “The neurosurgeon changed my life.
