Cooper Greer faced severe scoliosis and became one of the first kids treated with new VerteGlide spinal hardware at Norton Children's Hospital.
By: June 22, 2026
Cooper Greer faced severe scoliosis and became one of the first kids treated with new VerteGlide spinal hardware at Norton Children's Hospital.
June 22, 2026
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Cooper Greer is a Lego-building preteen with a love for video games, YouTube channels and his dog, Daisy.
The New Albany, Indiana, sixth grader also has scoliosis, a disease that causes the backbone to curve. Since last September, he’s standing with better posture — without discomfort or uneven shoulders thanks to spinal hardware and surgery at Norton Children’s Hospital.
In just months, he was swimming with his P.E. class at school.
The journey started when Kayse Greer, Cooper’s mom, first noticed something was wrong with his shoulders at home.
“He bent over, and I thought, ‘Oh, goodness,’” Kayse said. “He was starting to get a noticeable hump on the right side. So that was when we first reached out to our regular pediatrician. She saw Cooper in her office and suspected there was an issue and referred us to a specialist.”
Doctors tried a standard treatment of bracing for over two years, along with Schroth method of physical therapy, but Cooper’s curve accelerated — from 30 degrees to 55 and two months later, 72 degrees. Kayse learned Cooper’s form of scoliosis was moving faster than typical cases.
According to Kayse, orthopedic spine surgeon Kent L. Walker, D.O., of Norton Children’s Leatherman Spine, first evaluated Cooper in February 2025 and then again in June 2025 after his physical therapist noticed the curve getting worse. While there are several treatments for scoliosis, Cooper’s age, 11, and condition limited options. Even traditional growing rods, which require multiple follow-up procedures as the patient grows, can limit torso growth and lung development.
“I didn’t want Cooper to grow up and have really long legs and a stunted torso,” Kayse said. “He’s going to be tall — I’m almost 6 feet tall and his grandfather is 6-feet-5,” Kayse said. “We had to look for a different option.”
In the innovative VerteGlide system, screws above and below a fused spine section are attached to bone but “glide” along a metal rod as the child grows.
“It allows for the lungs to mature,” Dr. Walker said. “What I tell my patients is you can’t have a 25-year-old patient with 6-year old’s lungs. And so essentially it allows for the lungs to grow so they can develop into adulthood.”
Shortly before Dr. Walker performed Cooper’s surgery in September, he and pediatric orthopedic spine surgeon Richard E. McCarthy, M.D., with Norton Children’s Orthopedics of Louisville, completed the first VerteGlide surgery in the world.
“We just got lucky,” Kayse said. “Had the hardware not already been approved, I’m not sure we could have waited, because Cooper’s curve was progressing so quickly.”
The system works specifically for young children who aren’t candidates for other procedures or scoliosis treatments such as bracing.
“Cooper, he’s a special young man. He’s a ball of joy,” Dr. Walker said. “And his family’s very tall. We felt he had a lot of growth. And so, during that growth period, his lungs will continue to develop. We can help straighten him and help his balance and help his development, but then also allow his lungs to grow at the same time.”
Cooper faces potentially just one additional surgery, when he stops growing. Traditional growing rods mean repeated surgeries as doctors loosen, move and retighten screws.
“But we know that kids don’t really grow a centimeter or two over one night. We know that they grow every night slowly,” Dr. Walker said. “And the idea of the VerteGlide is it allows the body to grow at the rate that it actually wants to grow.”
Because Cooper has an autism diagnosis, Kayse and the care team carefully explained to Cooper the concept of surgery. They visited the hospital so the environment would feel familiar on surgery day.
“Cooper was very nervous about having stitches and them doing surgery on his back,” Kayse said. “There’s no way we could have done it without him being ready. We had to talk through it, help him feel more comfortable and try to help him understand.”
Dr. Walker brought in a spine model two weeks before the procedure to walk Cooper through what would happen. “So, one of the things I use a lot are spine models,” Dr. Walker said. They “show what their spine looks like … what the spine should look like after surgery and exactly what the technology can do.”
“If you didn’t know him — you wouldn’t know that he had surgery,” Kayse said. “He’s back to all his activities, and he does not have the curve in his spine.”
According to Kayse, her confidence in medical innovation comes from her experience with Cooper’s premature birth at 23 weeks and his time in the Norton Children’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit a decade earlier.
“After going through Cooper’s birth and four months in the hospital, with doctors telling me he had low chance of survival, I’m all about new technology,” Kayse said. “New technology and trust in our medical team saved my son. “It’s usually there for a reason. It will eventually improve a kid’s life. It will save a child’s life.”