SELINSGROVE -- All Kimber Kreamer wants to do is serve her country. The only thing standing in her way, it seems, is the military.

Kreamer, 17, of Selinsgrove, is a senior at Selinsgrove Area High School. For the past few months, she has been working hard to achieve a long-held dream -- to join the U.S. Air Force.

But last month, her military recruiter delivered heart-breaking news.

"He told me I will never be allowed to serve my country while being enlisted in the United States Air Force," she said, "or any Air Force organization."

The reason?

Kreamer has scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, and the angles of her spine are 6 percent greater than the Air Force allows.

The Air Force's measurement limits for the spine are 30 percent and 20 percent. When Kreamer went through 12 hours of testing in December at the Military Entrance Processing Station in Harrisburg -- a requirement in order to enter any branch of the military -- doctors noticed a curve in her spine and asked that she come back in a few weeks for X-rays.

When she returned, the X-rays showed her spine's measurements at 36 percent and 26 percent, and the doctors disqualified her.

The surgeon general later denied her a waiver.

Kreamer sees it all as a form of discrimination. "They don't know me as an individual," she said, "what I'm capable of."

She has been president of the Outdoors Club at Selinsgrove Area High School since her junior year.

"I was not voted in as president," she said. "My teachers picked me, not because of my personality or my ability to get along with others. They picked me because of my ability to do things in the great outdoors."

Kreamer was diagnosed with scoliosis in middle school, but didn't think it would stop her from having a normal life.

"I didn't really think anything of it," she said.

She has been white-water rafting, and rock climbing and backpacking with a 50-pound pack in West Virginia.