BOSTON -- Sitting through an entire Red Sox game at Fenway Park used to seem unfathomable for Rhonda Mann.

For the past 30 years she has battled scoliosis, but the condition worsened in the past decade to the point where the 54-degree S-shaped curve in her spine meant mundane things -- like sitting still or doing laundry -- were painful enough to bring her to tears.

“I used to cry getting out of the car, it used to be so painful,” she said.

Chronic pain permeated her days and interrupted her sleep at night. Finally, she and her doctor agreed it was time to operate, or else the ever-increasing spinal curve could start to crush her internal organs.

In February, Mann went to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center -- where she now works as the hospital’s director of marketing -- for two days of unfathomable surgery.

Dr. Paul Glazer removed a rib and six spinal discs on the first day. The following day, through a second large incision that stretches from the base of her neck to her tailbone, he reconstructed Mann’s spine into one with no perceptible curve at all.

An x-ray reveals the scaffolding that supports her new backbone -- two titanium rods, screws, hooks, wires and a kind of medical “cement” that is mixed using the crushed bone removed in the first part of the dramatic surgery.

Now nearly six months after her surgery, NewsCenter 5’s Liz Brunner checked in on Mann’s recovery.

"So what does it feel like to have that rod up your back?” Brunner said.

"It’s like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, where you have a pole up your back and as you shrug your shoulders, the pole moves. It's just a very strange thing that your have to get used to," Mann said.

At the five month follow-up appointment, Glazer shows Mann where the surgical “cement” made with her own bone and a morphogenic protein is hardening better than they hoped. Glazer said it will take a full year to harden completely.

“It's fantastic,” he said. “It looks like you're healing really well. This is what we're hoping to achieve. The alignment of the spine in good. She's maintained her correction.”

While that’s welcome news, Mann is thrilled that with her pain easing, she has recently started to consistently sleep through the night for the first time in eight years.

“I used to have to take pain medicine at night and then pain medicine when it wore off in the middle of the night, I used to be up quite a bit at night," Mann said.

But the weight of what she has gone through this year still hits her at unexpected moments.

“I realize now that before I had this surgery I was depressed, just having chronic pain all the time. My whole life I've worried about my back, what's going to happen to my back, and now I don't have that worry, it's done, it's done," Mann said.

The tiny movements of physical therapy, that would once have seemed so small, are now making her body strong again. But long days at work and home wear her out faster than they used to.

“You peak and then you plateau, I used to say you take like five steps forward and then two back," Mann said.

Then there are the moments it’s all worth it -- the moments when she’s not thinking about her back, like when she recently sat pain-free through an entire Red Sox game at Fenway Park.

"So at three months [post-op] you were able to come to a game, and were you able to make it through all nine innings?” Brunner said.

"All nine innings, yeah, and we won, so it was a good game," Mann said.