I was brushing my teeth, scanning the mirror over the sink to see if my freckles had faded as the cream I’d ordered and faithfully applied had promised. They did fade a bit in winter, and it was a cold January morning. I dressed in the bathroom, which was warmer than my north-facing bedroom, the coldest in the house.

My mother (never one to observe the personal boundaries of a morbidly shy sixth grader) burst into the bathroom where I was enthroned.

“Mother! Could you just knock, please!”

“Sorry-let me see that shoulder.”

Earlier in the week, Midnight had leaped to my bare shoulder as I stood in my slip. The cat hated me, though I’d never done anything worse to her than dress her in doll clothes. The scratches were healing, a fact my mother confirmed.

“You have a hump on your back," she announced.

I reached for my favorite sweater, the one with gray, white, and black horizontal bands and a shawl collar with a tassel. Pulling it over my head, I said, “Gotta go.” And I did—her attention was suffocating me. She was always overly solicitous about her children; I ignored her comment about my back.

She watched me walk to school that morning—my parents had chosen the lot on which to build their new home for this purpose—and decided I “walked funny.” Within relatively short order, I saw an orthopedic and was fitted for a brace, called a Milwaukee birdcage. My personal torture chamber, as I thought of it, was to prevent further spinal curvature until I stopped growing, when I would undergo surgery. The diagnosis was idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, which now in medical literature has its own acronym, AIS. If you choose, you can read about the effect of AIS, a disease that most frequently strikes young women, on self-esteem. Back when I was being treated, self-esteem hadn’t been invented.

The damage to my self-esteem, which was fragile anyway because of my weight and my freckles, is a topic for another day. But one of the perplexities of that time was why and how my body—without polio, without an accident—decided to grow crooked, and to do so without my knowledge or permission.

I felt betrayed, and retreated further in the direction I was already headed, the life of the mind. I couldn’t trust my body, and the fundamentalist religion I had chosen to embrace told me I couldn’t trust my emotions. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” asked the prophet Jeremiah, in a verse we were encouraged to memorize. And if Jeremiah wasn’t authority enough, there was my disastrous crush on an older neighbor boy, who’d kissed me the summer before. The mind, where I lived most of the time for decades, was the only safe place.

The same sense of betrayal surfaced with my cancer diagnosis. Without symptoms, without my permission or knowledge, my immune system took a break and opportunistic cells began mutating. They kept it up for years, silently growing and spreading tentacles like some monster on Creature Feature, the late night movie program my mother and brother loved to watch.

I expressed this betrayal to a friend, who tried to be comforting. “That will never happen again,” he told me. “They are going to watch you like a hawk. Nothing is going to sneak up on you.”

I didn’t want doctors watching me like a hawk would a mouse trying to cross a field. I’d already experienced that kind of surveillance—I’d had a mother.