Subject: How long did I have this fracture?
A couple of months ago, I slipped while running and got a nasty groin pull. By the time my doctor's appointment rolled around, I'd been x-training 3 weeks and all groin pain was gone, but he did a pelvic x-ray anyway.
Sure enough, when he magnified the one area where I could feel an ache if i balanced on one leg and raised the other in a peculiar way, he found a stress fracture. I couldn't see it until he pointed it out, partly because it was surrounded by fuzzy material that he said was new bone forming.
My question, if a stress fracture doesn't turn up on an x-ray for a long time, and often runners don't feel them untilthey've run on them a while, does this mean that I may have had this fracture for a long time? Or could the pulled adductors have caused it, or the fall? No other bone abnormalities showed up, and despite high mileage (70-80/wk), I haven't had any fractures before.
Thanks!
Cindy, if there is an acute fracture, bone will repair by forming a callous - what you describe as a "fuzzy area" around the fracture site. This implies that you fractured your pelvis or femur fairly recently. Now once formed, the callous remodels through a complicated physiological process (for those who must know - osteoblasts and osteoclasts are activated by a piezoelectric effect causing bone to be deposited and calcified along the lines of stress. Bone that is deposited - osteoblast activity- to form the callous is removed - osteoclast activity- if it does not add strength to the skeletal structure, and it is retained if it does.) This process can take months and even years to resolve - it is not uncommon for a very old fracture to show up years later when x-rayed due to the old callous formation about the fracture site.
