There was no war, no raging Armageddon. And yet, as the post-operative X-ray glowed on the monitor in the operating room, it bore a striking resemblance to a landscape once ravaged, now reclaimed. Screws gleamed like swords embedded deep into the vertebral columns — a battleground not of bloodshed, but of precision and purpose. The spine, once bent and unstable and in pain, had found its resurrection. Harmony, at last, was restored.

Pramila was a woman in her late fifties with a presence so warm and abundant that one couldn’t help but be reminded of the Laughing Buddha, not in jest but in reverence. She limped into our outpatient clinic, her wide smile shadowed by months of unrelenting pain shooting down both legs. She was dressed in a vibrant green saree, hair pulled back in a ballerina bun, but the picture of grace stopped there. “I’m miserable,” she said to me in Gujarati. “I can barely walk a few steps, and that too with complete dependence on the stick,” she spoke, breathless from the ache. “She used to be a dancer,” her son interjected, while she quickly shushed him with a nudge on his thigh under the table. “Gone are the days,” she lamented, her eyes welling up. 

Her spinal MRI revealed the underlying chaos: a compressed lumbar canal, thickened ligamentum flavum pressing down like a stubborn boulder, and listhesis — a slipping of one vertebra over the other — disrupted the spinal alignment. If the spine is a stack of pearls on a string, hers had begun to unravel. Beauty and fragility are always side by side in the world of anatomy.