EARLY SIGNS FEMUR STRESS FRACTURE

I am getting over a femoral neck stress fracture. I was doing high mileage this summer and literally one day I just could not walk and was in a great deal of pain. The pain was in my groin for the most part. The pain never got better, I took 6 weeks off of running then tried to come back (I had gone through many misdiagnosis') finally had an MRI done which showed the stress fracture. I have been running now for 4 weeks and just in the past few days I have had pain come back. I am very concerned because if this does not heal I will deffinitly have to get surgery. If it makes a difference I am a 20 year old female who runs XC and track at a D3 college. The day I could no longer run was July 15th so this has been quite a long process. Get to a good orthopedic doctor ASAP.

Throbbing in the area around were the fracture is. It will occur mostly at night when you are sleeping and will wake you up. Other signs include pain in a specific area when you are running. It is usually a dull pain until the actual fracture occurs then it progresses fast and you have to stop running. I usually would just walk my self back home when I knew it finally had hit. After recovery you may fell pain in the same area. This is often just a phantom pain in that area. I'm not sure why it happens. I don't want to say you are healed but you may be experiencing this.

i felt it most when i first woke up. or after sitting down for a long time. like a previous poster said it was a kind of throbbing pain. sorry if you have it man, i still haven't recovered yet.

Mine was like everyone else's so far...only a dull ache. I kept running on it because I kept thinking I was just sore from training hard. The pain got really strong, but it never became a sharp pain like my tibia and metatarsal (?sp?) fractures. There is a test that a knowledgeable person can do where you sit on the edge of a table and someone pushes down on your knee. When they did it to me, I screamed bloody murder it hurt so bad, and the next week, I showed up with a positive bone scan. Sorry if you have one. They really suck.

i had a femural neck stress fracture. there was a dull pain in my hip where the fracture occured but i also had pain lower in the quad area. Go get a bone scan after you see a physical therapist. The xray they give you won't show anything. After 6-8 weeks off there was a little pain in the area but that was only muscular pain from it not being used.

My femural stress fracture was in the shaft of the bone, not the neck. The only pre-fracture symptom was a vague pain deep in the thigh after a long hilly trail run that I wrote off as quad soreness. The truth came out, however, after finishing a flat 30K road race a few days thereafter (poor planning on my part, obviously) when my leg collapsed under me after crossing the finish line. Interestingly, there was no discomfort during the race -- guess my working muscles held things together. This was mid-March. So much for Boston that year! My orthopedist said to not do anything that hurt, so I rode my bike a lot, took stairs one at a time, was able to hike in the Rockies by the end of June, and resumed running mid-August. Wouldn't you know that my calcaneus would be the next to go (in Oct of the same year), and then my tibia a couple of years thereafter, despite starting on a regimen of Fosamax. Now I do as much of my training on trails, grass, or the track and limit my road miles as much as I reasonably can.

I had one in the shaft

I used a bone growth stimulator. It heals the fracture soooo much quicker. I would highly recommend it. I took 6-7 weeks off. Dr said it would take 12 or so w/o the stimulator. I didn't even bike, to fully let it heal. No weight bearing besides walking a little. Then you have to come back slow. If you feel it when you come back then stop running b/c it is not healed and is still broken.

One symptom that no one has mentioned is tight hamstrings. I experienced this with both of my right femoral shaft stress fractures. The tight hamstrings eventually progressed to hip flexor and groin pain. For my first stress fx, I was also misdiagnosed (not by a doctor, but by a trainer). The trainer did not know what her limits where, and felt that she knew just as much as an MD. When I kept asking her if my pain could be the result of a femoral stress fracture, she dismissed it as something that is extremely rare. Therefore, she kept refusing to send me to the team physician. When I finally was able to see a licensed physician--Bingo--MRI reveals edema in the shaft of my femur, indicative of a stress fracture. In my opinion, no chronic groin pain should be written off as a muscle strain. It should be investigated further to rule out a stress fracture.

I was diagnosed with stress fracture along the medial shaft of my femur late may, but i had seriously hurt it in mid-april during a 1500. At first, the MD saw me for like 3 minutes and wrote it off as a sore groin. I was in intense pain, especially getting in and out bed at night and in the moring. The pain was really vague and seemed to change spots throughout my leg. I think its called reffered pain since your bones have little nerve endings. I was massaged and that didn't seem to work, that was kind of a clue something was seriously wrong. Then, in May the Doc informed me of the severity of my injury. I took two months off completely from any running and sparingly rode the stationary bike. I slowly increased the x-training over the end of the summer and started running a the end of 5 months no running.

Mine was in the middle of the shaft. At first it felt like

a grain of sand was between my quad muscle and bone. The

Dr. diagnosed it (later confirmed by bone scan only bec I wouldn't believe it) by having me sit on a table with the edge of the table just under where the "grain of sand" was. He pressed on my knee, which was protruding off the end of the table. Yowee! it hurt.

I was on crutches for 3 weeks, and started back running at 6 weeks.

Good Luck. For what it's worth, this was the only stress fracture I ever had despite many years of 70mi/wk. I attribute it to two facts. I had found a pair of shoes that fit very nicely but had much less cushioning than I have always worn. I was uncharacteristically running about 25 mi/wk (of my 70) on sidewalks.

I fractured the femoral neck. I noticed a dull pain during a workout one day. It will not be an intense pain at first, it will almost feel like you have just tweaked something. The pain is widespread which makes it difficult to diagnose without MRI. Within a day or two you will begin to feel severe pain, much worse than the first sign. Also, you may feel some pain when lifting the leg while sitting. These are all key signs of a femoral stress fracture.

Oh my gosh! This same exact thing is happening to me now! I can;t do Boston either! I got an MRI and they said the bone is swollen though, so no fracture. Any advice?