Old-lady bones

There's a television ad running these days that features a group of middle-aged women in a restaurant celebrating the 50th birthday of one of them. The birthday girl scoffs at the idea that she should take a calcium supplement, thinking she's too young to get osteoporosis. I've always had good bones according to the bone-density tests I've had, so like the woman in the ad (and many ads like it), I haven't worried much about osteoporosis. Now that I have a vertebral fracture whose cause is vague and might be multifactorial (including the possibility that the anti-cancer drug I took for two years caused my bones to dissolve), I've been Googling "compression fracture." And the consequences of bone-thinning are a lot scarier than I'd ever realized. In an earlier post I showed a link to an X-ray that resembles my collapsed vertebra.


The drawing here, taken from a website my friend Hugh sent me, shows more explicitly what's happening. If you're a middle-aged woman especially (but it can happen to men, too), take a good look! It's quite painful (I believe mine has collapsed to a much greater extent than this one). Fractures like these can be the result of trauma or cancer but are most commonly caused by osteoporosis. I looked for other sites on compression fractures, and the most interesting finding (as in this one) was more confirmation that one symptom of the kyphosis (dowager's hump) accompanied by these fractures is a protruding abdomen: basically, one's organs become cramped by the downward pressure, which can lead to serious breathing problems, gastrointestinal complaints and weight loss because you always feel full. This has definitely been happening to me, exacerbated by the fact that my abdominal organs are already cramped because my spinal fusion was performed when I was so young: I've lost weight but still have a bulging upper abdomen, my stomach is often upset, and my breathing is often shallow. I'm hungry when I lie down, but as soon as I stand up, I feel full.

The good news is that with rest and time, these fractures are supposed to heal in a matter of weeks or months. But my pain has got steadily worse in the year and a half since it began. The website above says that even after the fractures heal, the compensatory things your back muscles do can continue to cause pain. Clearly other factors are involved, though I'm happy to report that in the past couple of days I've been able to walk greater distances than I have in the two months since my lumpectomy. I still feel fatigued, though, and every time I stand up my head spins and throbs.

Pollyanna moments:

• My best friend is visiting for almost a week, and we're laughing a lot.
• The sun has been shining like crazy.
• Yesterday I walked nearly half an hour, mostly pushing my wheelchair, on the way to the grocery store and back, and though it's not a beautiful walk, I felt like a human being for the first time in many weeks. You never imagine how much you'd miss doing something simple like going for groceries under your own steam.
  
• My next-door neighbour offered to take all the dead stuff off my front and back yards today, which will make things look even springier.