“When I was diagnosed with scoliosis, my family began looking for a facility to perform the surgery in Minnesota. I’ll never forget the first appointment. They basically told me that following surgery, my climbing would be over,” Kyra Condie says. “I was 12 and was understandably upset and crying. This activity that I had fallen in love with was going to be taken away. It was then that the medical provider told me that it would be ‘OK,’ and that I would be a wife and mother one day, and that in the grand scheme of things, climbing wasn’t that important. I kind of stopped listening at that point.”

As Kyra would say and time has shown, it turns out that climbing IS very important to her. It wasn’t until her consult from John Lonstein, MD, at Gillette Children’s that Kyra and her family heard any good news.

“Our appointment at Gillette was different from the start. We met with Dr. Lonstein right away. He did the examination and was just incredibly positive,” Kyra says. “We told him about my previous appointments and he proposed a procedure that would fuse 10 of my vertebrae rather than 12. After my surgery and recovery, he told me to send him a picture of me on top of the podium of the next climbing competition I won. Hearing that, we knew that Gillette was where we wanted to be.”

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