Going Off Script by Giuliana Rancic Page B

terrified. After so many years of dread, denial, and tentative hope, it was as if the monster had finally won. I was cornered.
    “The alternative is to live in pain and have it get even worse and eventually have to do the surgery anyway,” Dr. Kostuik said.
    I was still desperate to negotiate.
    “I’m graduating in the spring and then really want to go to graduate school. Can it wait three years?” I asked.
    The doctor shook his head. “You’ll curve another one to three degrees a month,” he said.
    “I can’t even wait and go to my graduation in a few months?”
    “No.” My spine was collapsing in on itself. I couldn’t wait three years, or three months. Even one month was gambling.
    Surgery was scheduled for January 6, 1996. The operation would last around eight hours. My entire back would be splayed open. A couple of times a week for several weeks leading up to D-day, I had to give blood to the bank for the surgery. There was no way to pretend anymore that this wasn’t happening. I had no delusions about the pain that was awaiting me, and I was terrified.
    Snow was forecast the morning of the surgery, so my parents drove me to Baltimore the night before, and we stayed in a hotel a few miles from the hospital. We woke up to a record-breaking blizzard that ended up causing $3 billion in damage and 154 fatalities across the Northeast. The roads were almost impassableeven with our four-wheel drive, and we were late for pre-op. The hospital felt eerily deserted, with only essential staff called in. Dr. Kostuik stopped in before I was rolled to the operating room.
    “What degree will I be?” I asked. My curve was at forty-five degrees. How uncrooked could he make me? Fifteen degrees or less would be fantastic.
    “I think I will be able to take you to ten degrees,” Dr. Kostuik reassured me.
    As the anesthesia pulled me under, I found the nerve to urge him to do better.
    “Can you make me zero degrees?” I groggily asked.
    “Zero?”
    “I know you can do it. Please make me zero and take my awful curve away for good.”
    “I will try,” he promised.
    I remember waking up during the surgery, seeing faces and lights hovering over me, and hearing an urgent voice say “She’s awake!” before I plunged back down again, feeling scared. When I came to again, my bed was being pushed to the recovery room. I saw Dr. Kostuik smiling at me.
    “I made you straight,” he said. “I made you a zero.”
    That first night, I was certain I was dying. There was only one nurse working on the orthopedic floor because of the blizzard, and it felt like forever before she gave me my painkillers. Within an hour of swallowing the two horse pills, I was gagging. I spent the next three hours dry-heaving. It felt as if every single stitch was ripping open and every already traumatized muscle along my spine was being wrenched. The blood vessels in my eyes burst. I was a weeping, hysterical mess. The pain overwhelmed me. It was far worse than I had ever dreaded or imagined—a blinding pain, white-hot and relentless, like being mauled from within by some wild animal. No morphine in the world couldcarry me away. Thumb frantically pumping, I would dispense the maximum dosage as soon as it was time, then beg the nurses to
do something,
give me something, anything, because the morphine wasn’t cutting it. Monica took the train down from New York and slept in a chair in the corner of my room. I could hear her crying for me. She was the only one who understood what hell I was going through, and how desperate my helplessness made me feel. I would sit up all night, my eyes fixed on the wall clock, waiting for the doctors to make their morning rounds, not wanting to risk being asleep when they came for their five-minute exam. I was convinced they would find some way to conquer the pain.
    “Giuliana, go to bed,” my mother would chide. “Nothing will be different tomorrow.”
    “No, Mama, we’re going to have an answer,” I would