I winced and took a deep breath as another blinding flash of pain shot through my thigh. Grimacing I hurried after my friends, “Guys wait up!” I yelled, limping as not to put any pressure on my right leg. “What’s wrong?” my friend Sandra yelled back. “It’s my thigh again, it’s killing me!” She stopped and ran back over to me, my other two friends Cailin and Stephanie stopped and ran back with her too. “Is it really bad again?” Cailin asked looking concerned. “Yeah it is, and it feels like it’s getting worse.” I said back, biting my lip and taking another deep breath as another stab of pain ran up my thigh. Looking back on that moment I should have known right then that it was more than just some pain from all the running that I was doing in cross country or a pulled quad muscle. But being that we were only a few weeks into the season of my sophomore year I didn’t think that much of it. Everybody’s legs are sore at the start of the season, I kept reminding myself. You just have to build up the miles and then you will be fine. This reassurance only went so far however; later on even walking would become almost unbearable.
But I don’t want to jump to the end of the story before I tell you when this all started to happen and how just a few tiny decisions would end up saving me from something way more serious.
I still remember the day that I first noticed something was wrong with my right leg. It was hot as always; the sun was shining and the wind was nothing more than a gentle whisper as it passed by. But I could hardly enjoy it as my feet pounded down the gently curving sidewalks, the uneven stretches of gravel, and the soft dense grass that made up our warm up lap around the perimeter of the fields in front of Maine South. I felt the sun beating down on my face and smelled the freshly cut grass as I ran next to my friends, feeling the gentle breeze play across my face and in my hair. Breathing hard we all slowed to a stop and then stretched our arms and legs for our workout for the day. After we stretched our coach announced what we were going to be doing that day, a run to the hill by Washington school and then sprints up and back down the hill. As I ran there I began to notice a strange tightness in my right quad, at first I thought nothing of it, it’s just a little tight, I kept telling myself. But as the workout continued my leg bothered me more and more. I began to get worried, shaking my head I pushed those thoughts away and focused back on my running.
Then came the sprints up the hill. The first group went, powering up the hill and bounding back down. Now it was my turn, as I looked up the hill I reached down to massage my quad. There is nothing wrong, I told myself and started to sprint towards the hill. My feet pounded the ground as I climbed the hill, but as the incline increased so did the pressure on my quad. About half way up the whole world seemed to catch its breath, a sudden wave of pain swept over me flowing up from my thigh and rippling throughout my body. Gasping I stumbled up and down the hill, stopping at the bottom my leg felt extremely tight I had no idea what was wrong.
The only thing I knew was that I wasn’t running on it anymore that day. “There is something wrong with my quad and it hurts really bad” I told my coach, she told me to rest, sit, stretch, and ice my leg and see how it felt tomorrow.
All I knew was something was seriously wrong and I had no idea what it was.
The next couple weeks I ran on and off until finally my leg hurt so bad I decided to go see the doctor. The first time that I went one of the assistant doctors saw me; he told me “it’s probably nothing and I don’t think it’s anything serious.” I took an x-ray but it showed nothing so I went home with no answers but a lot of questions.
Why wasn’t anything showing up? I knew that this was more than a pulled quad muscle because I had had one before. No, this was something different. It wasn’t just tightness anymore. It was almost as if it was my bone itself, and every time I tried to run or put too much pressure on my leg it felt like someone was stabbing it. A few more days went by and sometimes I wondered if something was actually wrong. The doctor said that he couldn’t find anything amiss but still I wasn’t getting better, the scale finally tipped and I told my mom that we needed to go back to the doctor. We both knew that this wasn’t just something that would go away without treatment.
The second time we went back I got an MRI, which can detect more and give better detail than a normal x-ray can. The whole time I was nervous, my heart was pounding. What if they didn’t find anything, then what? During 40 minute MRI I contemplated everything that led up to that moment. Was this finally the end? Would I finally get a sound answer to what was causing my leg to hurt so badly?
As the results came back I finally got an answer.
The MRI images showed that I had a stress fracture running all the way from the top of my femur down to almost the bottom. “It’s a good thing that we did this test when we did because otherwise if the fracture a little worse you would have to have surgery to repair it.” The doctor’s words shocked me. Surgery? I couldn’t believe how close I had been to an extremely serious injury. True I couldn’t do anything for months and had to have crutches for over two weeks until it healed enough where I could walk without it hurting, but anything was better than weeks of recovery and physical therapy that would come from having surgery. I still think back to the day I first noticed it, the pain and the unknown, the little decisions and persistence that followed and that led to an answer.