Spinal Surgeries Don't Stop NYC Woman From Globetrotting

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Twelve years separated the two surgeries that Upper West Sider Noa Hankin has had to fix her scoliosis. She has no memory of the first, which she got at age 2 to straighten the curve in her spine that she was born with. She went on to become an active kid and a competitive soccer player.

But the curve crept back, and bad back pain forced her to stop playing with the travel team she was on. The orthopedist who performed her first operation, Dr. David Roye, decided she needed another at age 14 — and this one stuck with her.

"I remember feeling anxious and nervous," said Hankin, now 21. "I didn’t remember my past surgery so I didn’t really know what to expect."

While it briefly took her off the pitch and out of school, scoliosis did not stop Hankin from trotting the globe.

Now a rising senior at Brandeis University, she spent this past spring semester studying in Prague and jaunting to several other destinations around Europe, including Poland, Spain and Italy. She's now considering law school and interning for the summer at the New York Attorney General's Office.

"Because I've received such incredible care, it hasn't been a huge worry in my mind," Hankin said. "... I've never really felt like I had to hold myself back from doing things that I enjoyed."

Roye, the orthopedist who has followed Hankin throughout her life, is a colleague of her mother, Dr. Dawn Hershman, the leader of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center's breast cancer program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Dual surgeries like Hankin's are not unusual for kids with congenital scoliosis, a curvature in the spine that appears early in the life of a fetus, according to Roye, the chief of pediatric orthopedic surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

Untreated scoliosis can cause a range of problems from breathing trouble to neurologic issues, Roye said. Doctors try to wait as long as possible to operate on kids born with it as they don't want to fuse too much of the spine too soon, he said. But it was almost certain that a kid like Hankin would need a second surgery because her first one came at such a young age, he said.

"If you fuse the spine in a very young child then that segment that you fuse stops growing," Roye said. "That means the trunk height is reduced, and it means that the patient is going to be cheated of height. It also means that there’s less room inside the chest for the lungs and for the other organs."

Hankin was also born with a heart abnormality that a separate surgery fixed in the early days of her life, Hershman said. Roye followed the girl closely leading up to the first spinal operation, checking in on her every few months, according to her mom.

The scoliosis didn't hinder Hankin as a kid. "I was able to run for hours at a time without my back hurting," she said. But the curvature in her spine grew more pronounced in her eighth-grade year at Columbia Secondary School, as did the pain in her back.

Roye performed the second surgery on Hankin in March of that year. She was out of school for about six weeks as she recovered with physical therapy. Hershman said she worried more the second time around about her daughter's awareness of the pain, her physical limitations and the social reality of settling back into school — an awareness she lacked as an infant.

"I don’t think I could carry a backpack, so I had an elevator pass, which made my friends all want to ride the elevator with me," Hankin said. "It was an adjustment, kind of acclimating to sitting in a classroom all day, just getting back in the swing of learning."

But Hankin has taken her learning outside of the classroom as a college student. She said she studied economics and businesses, interned at the British Chamber of Commerce and took a course in the Czech language during her semester in Prague.

The program that brought Hankin there included trips to Poland, Hungary and Austria, including a six-hour tour of Auschwitz that she described as "incredibly depressing but also incredibly impactful."

She also traveled independently to a slew of cities including Rome, Paris, Berlin, Edinburgh and Barcelona, which she called her favorite for its "beautiful weather, amazing food and stunning architecture."

The scoliosis gives Hankin minor cramps and pains when she sits or stands for a long time, she said, but "besides that it’s not much of a burden while I travel."

Before she took an interest in law, Hankin interned with Roye's clinical research team as a junior in high school. Her mother sees a connection between that experience, her battle with scoliosis and the public-service legal internships she's done in college.

"I think that her medical experiences have made her very acutely aware of other people's needs, and she's focused in various different ways on helping other people," Hershman said.