First fracture.

The hip bone connects to the femur, the femur connects to the patella,

the patella connects to the tibia, the tibia connects to the tarsals

the tarsals go all meta.

My first bone broke when I was thirty-eight unless that toe bone counts. I've pondered how my broke my right pelvic bone as much as when I broke it. It was a stress-fracture. Hairline. At first, I felt a strain. The ache burned around mile two of my customary morning ten-miler. The ice on the sidewalks made me feel like an elderly woman in a shower, like Bambi when he first stood. All legs going all which-ways. I turned back at mile three because I couldn't call my husband for a rescue. He and my daughter were at winter camp. My son and a friend were asleep in my house. I walked the miles at my treadmill desk pulling and limping my way over a spinning belt.

I heard, "Have a doctor look at that toe. One break can cause other injuries." My cousin recommended after a fall in July. I'd splatted, six miles into a hot sixteen-miler, training for the Chicago Marathon. Blood streamed from my knee. For days, it oozed yellow pus because I picked myself off the concrete, ran slow miles to a gas station, rinse and ran on. I finished ten more miles in the euphoria of the run and the dulling action of nerves under duress. My scar remains, like Sauron's eye, staring out from my knee. My second biggest toe arches like a pianist's fingers playing a concerto. I splinted the toe with a popsicle stick and medical tape. I wiped ooze from under days of bandages. I ran on. 

Until I stopped running at mile three. The next day, I tried the trusses of my 1874 Victorian, jogging at 6.0 on my treadmill, the bookshelves shivering, the china cabinet threatening to spill my wine glasses to their ledges. If I ran longer, they'd have leaped to their death when I pulled open the cabinet. I ran with ibuprofen. Four every four hours.

Pretty rusty pills. When my husband came home the next day, I diagnosed myself with a groin sprain. I will walk it off, I told myself. 1. 8 miles per hour on the treadmill desk. Dreadfully slower than my 2.5 miles per hour. I moved the ibuprofen bottles to my bedside and my desk. I walked fifteen miles a day to keep up my daily goals. 

In week four, when I thought I'm crippled I called the doctor's office. 

"You. No sprain. Strain, said Dr. Hwang. No x-ray then.

I went back three weeks later, demanding an x-ray.

By this time, the pain like a steel rod, stung with heel strikes, ached in rest, made me waddle rather than walk. I waddled fifteen miles, white knuckling the sides of the desk. At night, I wore pads rather than let my stiff sore flesh rustle out of bed to relieve kidneys. Little peeps of urine and a full bladder hurt less than turning over or trying to find stability while I stood.

January was over. All the cold gear I bought for running never saw use. When the nurse at the doctor's office called with the x-ray results, she said, "You have a stress fracture." Yes I know,  I thought, but how long will this pain last. How long until I can let the cool clear outdoor air fill my lungs, how long until I can get up out of anything without grinding my teeth.

Is this because I tripped during the marathon or because I splinted my own toe and kept training? 

In February, my sister and I walked six blocks in the Harrisburg cold to eat curry. She walked next me slow. I told her I thought I needed anti-depressants. I grunted when I stepped off a curb or up. I grit my teeth. The rod I imagined in my femur jammed up into my pelvis. How long, O Lord? My sister said to call my doctor, the one who said "You no have sprain. Strained." But it was broken. All that stress. Sometime between December 19 and January 1 a small pinching had blossomed and one muscle or bone yanked on another until I could hardly stand. When did the bone just rattle and crack, not like the tiny fissures in muscle and bone which fill as they heal, making a skeleton stronger, not feeble. When should I call the doctor? When would I know if my spirit was stress fractured enough that I needed anti-depressants? I consulted friends who advised me to get ahead of the pain in my soul. I did not call then. 

It took three months to wean myself off of NSAIDs. I felt the pain still. I planned my first run for April 1st, Saint Mary of Egypt's feast day. She's my patron saint, an austere, formidable woman who battled her passions forty years alone in the desert on the far side of the Jordan. Naked. Alone. When I picked her, I thought I could learn from her personal discipline. After four months of walking, grad school, a younger sister being diagnosed with cancer, losing a job, killing a bear with a new car and other tortures, she scared me. How did she manage alone? I drank to anesthetize what the ibuprofen couldn't kill. The grain killed my writing. I nearly failed the semester. My professor scorned me with each paper: "I should fail you for one more comma error." I confessed all that happened to him once. He replied, "That's no excuse. I've had it bad too." I drank twice as much for a few weeks.

By the end of the semester, I developed a syndrome in my fingers and toes. They'd turn white, lose feeling, turn blue, then red and burn when I touched anything. A woman's nipples in the first weeks of pregnancy cannot brush silk with out searing. My fingers could not tap the keys without searing. My soul, when sober, burned.

On April 1st, I ran. Ten miles. And woke the next morning with shin splints.  On Pascha, a few weeks later, I curled in my bed, feeling touched, like Jacob in my hip. Would I ever run again? I missed my town as it looks on foot. I missed movement. I missed Paschal morning running where I whisper "Christ is Risen" to each block, to the Easter morning church goers and the a-religious mowing their lovely April lawns.

I curled in bed cursed. First fracture.