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The Broken Bone Game
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There are 206 bones in the human body, and I want to figure out how many of them we as a community have collectively broken. Therefore I am proposing a game where each post consists of an accident, what bones were broken, and how they were fixed. Please limit one accident per post, but you can post as many times as you want. I will highlight in bold what bones from the list below have been covered to simplify the process. Xray's, MRI's and other images are welcome. At the end I'll try to summarize the most common and least common bone breaks. Let's celebrate the bodies incredible ability to heal itself! [EDIT]: All Accidents are now welcome, just let me know if the Method of Injury was climbing related or not. Skull ((2 x 11) + 6 = 28)
Torso ((2 x 12) + 28 = 52)
Upper Extremity (2 x 32 = 64)
Lower Extremity (2 x 31 = 62)
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Climbing accident only? |
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Bone: Metacarpal 1 Left Accident: I fell off at the lip of Overlooked at Pawtuckaway in the worst possible way. For those of you who know this problem, you know where this is going. The landing is a big pile of granite boulders. It's terrible. But with proper spotting and enough pads, it's doable. But if you are bouldering noob (several years ago) and you mess it up, you miss the pads and eat shit hard. My foot popped on the lip and I did a cartwheel forward. I was glad I didn't hit my head on the many sharp granite edges as I bounced off of them. But I did hyperextend my left thumb and part of the tendon pulled a small piece of bone off the side of the metacarpal. My whole hand was black and blue for a while but I was climbing in 2 weeks and back to normal in two months. |
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Occipital Lobe Left Ring Finger phalange gone Right fifth metacarpal Left femur Left Tibia |
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Broke back fractured my L3 vertebra. |
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Are we doing full breaks only or fractures included as well? |
eli poss wrote: MD here. There is no difference between a break and a fracture. |
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Right Tibia & Right Fibula Longish fall onto slab landing with feet aligned horizontal to slope with right leg uphill. Lengthy crawl back to car. Glad to have a partner rigging top ropes in the gully and mechanical advantage up a short 4th class pitch. BERP: Breath (yep), Eyes (nope), Relax (yep), Push off (nope)   |
caesar.salad wrote: Obviously I'm confused so please clarify this. Is there not a difference a bone that is has fracture through 90% of it vs a bone that is completely broken into two pieces? I thought the former was a fracture and the latter was a break. Anyways, on March 28, 2016 I fractured my right Tibia in a 15 foot ledgefall almost on P2 of Apple Cider at East Animas in Durango, my home crag. I had gotten off route and started up this really sandy chossy dihedral and after about 20 feet it became obvious to my that I was off route. Being young, dumb, and bold, I decided to downclimb back to the ledge instead of leaving my gear to lower off. I downclimbed about 5 feet, removing my last piece of protection high enough to keep me off the ledge and continued to downclimb until I got to 1 move of overhanging climbing over a bulge. I couldn't downclimb this section, and this is where time started to slow down. In what felt like at least a minute, but was actually like 5 seconds, I thought about placing a piece to lower off of, but the rock here was too chossy and wouldn't hold, but I didn't have the strength left to climb back up to place a piece. And a second or two before my fingers slipped off a shitty crimp I realized that I had no other options and I was going to fall. I thought "Oh shit" and then slipped and fell. I fell about 15 feet onto an inward sloping ledge with a chasm in the middle of it, almost like a very shallow "V" shape. I landed on my feet, fracturing my right tibia at the ankle and then fell on my back slamming my head on the ledge. Thank God for brain buckets. As I fell a let out a yelp that I can only describe as a sound that a confused dog would make. This is quite different from the sound I made when I tried to stand back up, which was somewhere between a scream of agonizing pain and a very loud, angry "FUUUCCCCCKKKK". At this point, my partner realized what had happended (I was out of sight despite being only 20ish feet up the pitch) and started preparing to mount a rescue. Luckily for both of us, the ledge I had fallen onto was between the wall and a huge boulder and I was able to chimney with my left foot on the wall and my back against the boulder and build an anchor. I belayed my partner up 20ish feet of loose, broken 4th class terrain and then he lowered me down to the bolted belay station at the top of P1. Then he downclimbed the 4th class terrain on belay back to the belay ledge. When he got to the ledge he said "Well, you fucked up your ankle but at least I grabbed you some booty", and showed me a #7 stopper he saw in the chasm on the ledge above and grabbed for me. I let out a stressed laugh and replied "Totally worth it!", trying to stay positive while the adrenaline was still masking the pain. My partner lowered me to the ground and then rapped down. When I got to the ground I crawled over to my pack and started to look for my phone. After searching every nook and cranny, I realized that I had it in my pocket the whole time. Unfortunately, though, the fall did a number on it too. It was bent at a 120 degree angle. My partner did the best he could at splinting my ankle. He cut out a foam pad from the internal frame of his pack and we used a combination of clothing and runners to hold it all together, but my ankle was not immobilized and I still had to descend around 500' on a steep, rocky trail. Durango folks, you can imagine how much of a bitch it is to get down from East A with a broken ankle. On my partner's phone, we called a friend to come help us self-evac because the plan was to piggy-back me back down to the car (except for a few sections that were too steep where I'd have to crawl) and my partner wouldn't be able to do it alone. However, because my ankle was still quite mobile, it hurt too much to be piggy backed, so I just tripod crawled down on 1 foot and my hands for most of it and piggy-backed the flatter sections when my arms were too tired of crawling. After around an hour and half, I made it back to the car and my partner drove me half an hour to the ER. When we got there, we undid our makeshift splint and took my climbing shoe off. Unfortunately I was wearing my Evolv Addicts, slippers, and we had to cut part of the elastic upper to get it off. It wasn't the end of the world, though, as I had to cut it a little bit further later on to fit it over my ankle brace when I first started climbing again. The ER doctor said I was extremely lucky because the fracture discharged bone fragments and one fragment landed less than a millimeter away from the joint, which would have required potentially extensive surgery to remove and fix, and a permanently fucky ankle joint. I wish I had pictures of the X-rays but they have since been lost. Anyways, I got away with a month in a cast, a week in a walking boot, a few months of physical therapy, and 2 months of belay slave duty. Here's a photo of my first cast, taken the night of before I went to bed, baked out of my mind to kill the pain.  |
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My breaks are just from "falling down a flight of stairs," as Tyler Durden would say, but I just wanted to congratulate you on a stellar thread idea. Keep up the good work, sir. |
eli poss wrote: Yeah, there is no difference between those two terms. Generally, the medical term for a bone broken in any way is "fracture". That's what gets written in the health record. The following terms give greater detail. What you are calling a "fracture" is actually specifically an "avulsion fracture". Avulsion means a small piece of bone is separated from the main part of the bone, but the greater part of the bone is intact. That is what happened in my story.
PS: I love the dog paw print pattern on your cast. Never saw that on the ortho cart. |
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5/30/2015: Took a 30' tumble down a slab five pitches off the deck and broke my left Metatarsal #1. It was a heinous rap/walk back to the car. |
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2/5/2014: Stupidly followed my friend into the terrain park at Park City and took a wicked spill landing on my left rib cage in the flat of the half pipe. Broke my left 7-10 ribs, by far the worst injury I've ever had. I couldn't sit, stand, walk, sleep, basically move without pain for several weeks. I haven't strapped into a snowboard since, and I think I'll stick to my skis for the from here on out. |
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7/1/2017: got the tires of my bike caught between railroad tracks and the road sending my face first into the ground. I woke up sometime later in the hospital and found out I had a concussion and had broken my #5 metacarpal (right hand). The road rash finally healed as of about a week ago. |
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10/2008- Broken Left Talus Split it in half while bouldering at Stoney Point. Missed the pad, dislocated foot and snapped the talus pretty cleanly. Three screws and a pin. 3 months non-weight bearing. Luckily no AVN and it healed nicely. |
Skye Swoboda-Colberg wrote: The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions, sir. |
Adrenaline, my drug of choice, NONE of these were climbing. Climbing is safe if you do it right..................... ;) I showed my x-ray folder to a doctor once, he said "What killed this guy?" |
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1. T12 Compression Burst Fracture |
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left metacarpal 4 fully broken an awkward slip got my hand fouled up in a cam. no surgery and a fast full recovery thankfully enough. |
Skye Swoboda-Colberg wrote: Dirt bikes, minis, and jumping off high things into water....... ;) Old school mini  |
