Strength Through a Painful Bone Condition

Richard lives near me, and he carries a kind of steady good humor that doesn't match what his body has put him through. The trouble started in high school. He broke his leg, the first fracture landing in the hip, and he was admitted for treatment and sent to physical therapy. A few months later he fell again and cracked the same leg in a different spot. Back to the hospital he went, and this time surgeons fixed a metal plate across the bones to hold them while they knit.

Two breaks that close together struck everyone as odd. Richard knew I live with severe arthritis, so his first guess was that he might have arthritis too. I could tell his situation was something else entirely, and I pushed him to get a real diagnosis rather than assume. The problem was that wherever he went, clinicians handed him anti-inflammatory medication for arthritis, apparently taking his own theory at face value instead of running a careful workup.

The pills changed nothing. His bones kept giving way, sometimes while he was lying in bed, unable to move at all. The pain was so bad that doctors moved him onto heavy painkillers, yet none of them had identified what was actually wrong. Because he was a friend, I spent some time reading online and found accounts of children with the same pattern. One girl had broken bones fifty times over six years, with the fractures starting when she was still an infant.

Eventually one of the better hospitals in the area gave him an answer: Osteogenesis Imperfecta, commonly called brittle bone disease. It weakens the skeleton and makes fractures far more likely. The condition shows up differently from one person to the next, with possible signs including fragile bones, deformity, loose joints, weak muscle tone, short stature, and breathing difficulties. For Richard, the relentless fractures were the hardest part. He could be standing one second and crumpling the next.

There were many surgeries after that, some to join broken bones and others to straighten the deformities that crept in over the years. Hospital stays stretched into weeks. One operation had to treat both legs at once, because a rod in one leg had shifted out of position at the same time a fresh fracture appeared in the other. He hurt constantly. Where plenty of people would have slid into anger or depression or given up altogether, he kept his footing emotionally and never complained, holding onto the plan to heal and get back to an ordinary life.

I asked him once where that came from. He said it was simple: he believed, flatly and without qualification, that he would walk again one day without pain. He felt lucky, too. He had gone to school, started a business, and begun a family before the worst of the illness arrived, instead of losing his childhood and teenage years to it. That sequence gave him something to stand on and a future to picture.

What kept him going, he told me, was keeping his attention on the good parts of his life. His wife. His kids. The education he had finished and the business he had built before the condition worsened and started sending him back to the hospital again and again as an adult. And there was something else. Lying in those wards, he noticed patients in far worse shape than he was, and that observation turned into compassion rather than self-pity, even as he held his eyes on getting home.

Since those early injuries he has been on the right treatment at last. The relief of having the diagnosis corrected, and of knowing recovery is a matter of time, is real for him.

The three things Richard leaned on: gratitude for what was going right in his life; a clear picture of the future he wanted, meaning home with his family and walking free of pain; and the awareness that others around him carried heavier suffering, which grew into compassion.

- Anonymous Contributor