BOSTON -- It’s a shocking sight to see the X-ray of Rhonda Mann’s spine, twisted by severe scoliosis that has dogged her body since she was a teenager.

“One day my mother actually came up to me and said, ‘Why are your ribs sticking way out in the back, on one side?’ The next thing I knew I was in the pediatrician’s office and the pediatrician said, ‘You have scoliosis.’”

As a teenager and an athlete, Mann shunned surgery. Instead, she chose to wear a brace 23 hours a day, seven days a week.

"You couldn't sit in those desks at school where you had to kinds of maneuver to get into your seat. You had to wear bigger clothes, and I remember crying in the dressing room. It was very hard,” she recalled.

“One thing I remember is my dad coming and saying, ‘I wish it was me.’”

Difficult as it was, the brace helped bring Mann’s scoliosis under control for many years. She was a busy wife and mother of three, who for a decade led NewsCenter 5’s medical team, reporting her own stories as well as producing stories for medical editor Dr. Timothy Johnson.

For the past several years she has worked as a marketing executive at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

"It is debilitating. To wake up in the morning and to know that it is going to hurt to get out of bed, it's not a way to live your life." - Rhonda Mann

Then 10 years ago after the birth of her son, Jackson, a nagging pain in her back became constant and severe. The curve that was 24 degrees and only in her lower back when she was younger, had progressed to 44 degrees. Doctors said her spine was growing a degree more twisted, more painful each year.

“It is debilitating. To wake up in the morning and to know that it is going to hurt to get out of bed, it's not a way to live your life,” Mann said.

Everyday things like watching her son's hockey games, sleeping and driving to work were excruciatingly painful.

“There'd be times she'd be in the car, driving by herself, just crying because it just hurt. She’s the strongest person I know,” her husband Jay Dobek said. “She doesn't complain about it. There are times you can see it really hurts her.”

But in severe adult scoliosis cases like Mann’s, the solution is equally hard as living with the ailment.

Her specialist, Dr. Paul Glazer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, performed a drastic operation over two days.

On first day, Glazer removed one of Mann’s ribs, and six levels of spinal discs to increase spinal flexibility.

The next day, through a second large incision stretching from the base of her neck to her tailbone, Glazer and his team would manipulate Mann’s spine into a nearly straight position, holding it in place with steel rods, hooks, screws and wires.

The bone removed in the first day of surgery was ground up and mixed with a morphogenic protein, and used like cement to hold Mann’s new spine in place. It will take up to a year for the fusion to completely set.

“When they tell you what they're going to do it sounds crazy,” she said.

But after years of waiting, there really is no other option. When Glazer agreed to do the surgery, the curve in Mann's spine was 54 degrees. 90 degrees is a right angle.

“It just needs to be stopped so that it doesn't affect my breathing, it doesn't affect my other organs. I have bone spurs growing on my spine now it has to be stopped before it gets worse.”