RE: What gives?

[Vinny Natale <vnatale@map.com>]

When I was 16 or 17 and running track I had a pain in my foot.  The doctor
initially diagnosed it as a sprain but then he saw on the x-ray that it was
actually a stress fracture.  Turned out I'd run a mile race while I had it!
 The doctor explained to me that it was also called a march fracture as
many soldiers used to get them from marching and the stress it caused.  

A stress fracture is a hairline crack.  I was back running the mile races
in either two or three weeks.  That was how fast it healed.  Now I was
somewhat younger than Bruce Bowen but I suspect he has had a similar
experience and will also heal fairly rapidly.

Vinny


At 07:52 PM 3/27/98 -0500, Kim Malo wrote:
>At 06:16 PM 3/27/98 -0800, Greg Odegaard wrote:
>>Thank you for your response.
>>
>>The media reports state he has a stress fracture now.  Whether this is
>truly a broken bone in the literal sense, I don't know.  It is already
>serious, again as reported in the Globe and ESPN.  
>
>Yeah, a stress fracture is a kind of break, although calling something a
>fracture as opposed to a break usually means it's a lesser injury, sometimes
>merely a partial separation rather than going all the way through. If it's
>actually been building all year from some sort of precondition, it's likely
>basically a simple pulling apart. Again, using McHales' foot stress fracture
>that also developed over time and abuse as a parallel, that's basically what
>that was all about. The problem there was not letting it heal properly and
>making it worse by continuing to play on it. Dunno how comparable the two
>situations actually are, but there seems to be at least a working
similarity.