It began with what Harriet Kelsall describes as ‘a dramatic scene’. The mother-of-two, then 46, was out for a run when she stumbled and hit the pavement hard. ‘I grazed my knee and there was blood everywhere,’ she says. ‘Instinctively I’d thrown out my left hand to break the fall – and that was what really hurt.’
But finding that she could still move all her fingers, Harriet decided simply to go home. ‘I used an old wrist support and strapped two fingers together, which was uncomfortable but worked for the time being,’ she says. ‘But after about two weeks, I realised my hand had gone purple and I thought, this isn’t normal.
‘I went to the doctor and a scan revealed I’d broken two very small bones in my left hand and one in my wrist.’
Despite this, Harriet considered the whole thing to be mainly an inconvenience. ‘I was stupid for not seeing a doctor sooner,’ she admits.
However, after telling friends she’d broken her hand from a simple fall, they encouraged her to have a bone density scan. The results showed she was suffering from osteopenia, a bone-thinning condition that precedes osteoporosis – a debilitating condition also known as brittle bone disease.
