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Ladies, take your calcium

With my left foot hurting worse and worse instead of feeling better and better, I broke down and went to a podiatrist, who found a stress fracture in my second metatarsal. No wonder it hurt so much to walk.

Treatment involves wearing a surgical boot and trying not to take any more steps than necessary. I also get to keep using my glamorous cane.

I've been spending a lot of time with my feet up. In theory, it sounds luxurious, but the reality is on the dull side, especially when it's springtime outside and one is missing all the flowers. Especially when one has spent all winter looking forward to evening walks among the spring flowers.

But how, you ask, does one get a stress fracture? Skydiving? Jogging? Sticking one's landing after doing a backflip off the uneven parallel bars? Standing around in the kitchen stirring a pot of soup?

Any of those things can cause stress fractures, but the last one is only dangerous if you have very weak bones.

It turns out that I have very weak bones. Unexpectedly so. I'm not that old, so although bone-thinning is a known side effect of the steroids prescribed for my lupus, it was not expected that my dosage level would turn my bones to air.

So not fair. Other people get big muscles and 'roid rage. I get osteoporosis.

Now I get to take the old lady osteoporosis drugs and try not to worry too much about falling. Sucky as this is, though, I think it would be much worse if I were older. I'm in fairly good shape, and my balance is pretty good (though the fracture has thrown it off a bit and every wobble is terror-inducing when the consequences of a fall involve broken bones). My coping skills are getting quite the workout. I'm finding that when you're enduring a big thing with all the equanimity you can muster, there just isn't much equanimity left for the little things, like constantly dropping your keys (when you're juggling a cane in addition to the rest of the stuff you always carry, the keys are always leaping to the floor), or anything that requires extra walking (Stores reorganize. How dare they do this now?).

So if you're in your thirties or forties, and you think that your regular, or not so regular, weight bearing exercise and occasional dairy consumption are probably enough to protect you, you might want to re-evaluate that "probably". What level of certainty is appropriate for consequences that involve the bones in your feet cracking just from walking around? Even if the consequences are thirty years in the future?