Cracking Myself Up

Maybe it’s just me, but this whole “conquering setbacks and coming back a stronger person” thing is getting a bit old. Can we all agree that it’s time for some smooth sailing?

I had my bone scan on Friday, complete with a heart-stopping experience when the technician came to me halfway through and asked, “You don’t have a history of cancer, do you?” My stomach immediately turned to liquid as I said yes, and she said, “Oh.” Then she disappeared for ten minutes. My brain exploded with all the things this could possibly mean. Why did she ask me that? Did she see something on the scan she’s not telling me? Do I have some kind of bone cancer now? Is this not a running injury at all? Is this why I’m not getting better? What is that white blob on the left side of my pelvis on the image screen? Is that a tumour? (Cue hyperventilation and conclusion-jumping.)

Thankfully it turned out just to be a routine screening question, but they did give me an additional total body scan, “just in case.” Comforting. Thanks for giving me ten minutes of all out panic.

This is not my pelvis, but it's the same injury. Ouch.

On Monday, my family doctor called me. I’m sort of getting used to doctors calling me at home (that’s probably not a good sign, right?). She told me that she had my scan results, and they showed a stress fracture on my pelvis.

Huh. That explains a lot. (But to be honest, I was so relieved it wasn't a tumour that a fracture didn't seem all that bad.)

As it turns out, I’ve been walking around with a pelvic fracture for three months. Days of endless walking around Paris, lugging suitcases up and down stairs, hauling my two-year-old around on my hip, twisting and pulling myself into yoga poses, doing squats with heavy weights and plyometrics at the gym, attempting (and failing) to run over and over again…all of these things cannot have been particularly good for my healing. And that’s probably why it still hurts, even though such a fracture should theoretically heal within six to eight weeks (so says the almighty Internet).

In my defence, I had no idea that I was broken. Well, I had an inkling. When the injury first happened, it distinctly felt like bone pain, not muscle pain. But when I asked various health practitioners if it could be a stress fracture, nobody thought it was, so I eventually convinced myself it wasn’t. Lesson learned: trust your instincts. I should have advocated for myself more strongly and insisted on a bone scan sooner. This is where my pain threshold does not serve me well. In my frame of reference, my pain was a five or six out of ten, so because I wasn’t in excruciating pain, nobody thought “fracture.”

Now I know that many of you are taking a deep breath and ready to dole out an “I told you so.” Save it. I know when I’ve made training errors, but this time I did everything right. I increased training gradually, I didn’t increase speed and mileage in the same week, I did strength training and yoga to deal with muscle imbalances. I had my coach check out my form and training plan. I ate well. I took calcium and Vitamin D. But radiation is a killer of bone, and I came out of that hospital with osteopenia – a precursor to osteoporosis. My body felt ready, but deep inside it wasn’t. So I broke.

I'm now on a bone-building mission.

Did I know that I had osteopenia before embarking on such a tough training regime? I did. And yes, I did indeed “push it.” But running and weight bearing are good for your bones, and I had all of my doctors’ blessings to do what I was doing. (On a side note, you know you have problems when you have at least six different doctors and you know the names of your pharmacist’s kids and where they go on holiday.)

I guess you just don’t know you’re going to break until you do.

Now, knowing full well that many people would click their tongues and shake their heads and say, “Oh Rachel, she went and overdid it again,” I asked what I did wrong. After reviewing my training leading up to the injury, the sports medicine doctor said to me, “If you run a lot, you’re going to get injured. Period. And pelvic stress fractures are just one of those injuries. They happen to people who have perfectly healthy bones. You are at higher risk and just had bad luck. You regroup, get better and move on.”

In other words, your pity party is over, madam.

My husband had similar insight: “Look, you could use the elliptical three times a week and stay healthy and never get injured. But you wouldn’t be happy. If you’re going to drive your body like a race car, it’s going to break down a lot more often.”  I guess that explains why I have a pit crew.

Indeed. Couch potatoes rarely get athletic injuries. I’m happiest when I’m training hard and I’m most unhappy when I’m injured. Yet the two cannot really exist without each other. Ask any competitive athlete, professional or amateur.

So what now? The only thing you can really do for a fracture is wait. (And if you know me, you know how awesomely patient I am.) So I can postpone and do the race in 2015 (the doctor's recommendation), or I can keep training and aim for participation rather than competition (recommended by my physiotherapist and a triathlon coach I greatly respect). After my initial dismay, I realized that a fracture is better than a muscle tear or even the suspected bone inflammation, because it heals better and faster. A fracture sounds worse, but it actually isn’t. I will be able to run by race day. Whether I will be able to run fast is another matter entirely.

But at this point, does that really matter? Even if I crawl across the finish line, won’t I still have done it?

On the flight out to BC yesterday, I was watching ET Canada (nothing makes you feel better than watching the train wreck of other people's lives). But I was shaken out of my trash TV indulgence by the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who recently died of a brain tumour. Instead of "why me", I suddenly thought, why her and not me? And I finally remembered that this race was never about me at all. It’s about making life just a little bit better for others suffering from cancer. It’s about contributing dollars to research that can help people live longer and better. It’s about running and swimming and cycling for everyone who can’t. It really doesn’t matter how fast I do it, it just matters that I do it, celebrating life the entire way.

I was reading an old journal entry from last fall, and what I found there was another massive reality check (a common occurrence when you rarely have your feet planted on the ground). At that time, I was worried about blood counts, graft-versus-host disease, pneumonia, and making it to one hundred days post-transplant. Now I’m worried about whether or not I can race a triathlon as fast as I would like? I would say that’s quite a step up in one year.

Wait, did I just get a life lesson from this injury? Oh dear. I might just be learning something after all.

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