The Tamesis
“Fear is a great motivator,” says Steven R. Goldstein, MD, a New York gynecologist and professor at New York University who has been treating menopausal women for decades. “My patients are very happy with their breasts,” he says. “They’re getting mammograms and ultrasounds every year. I wish everyone was equally concerned about their bone health.” The statistics are truly scary: 21 percent of older women who fracture a hip die within a year, and 25 percent never live independently again. Goldstein admits that these numbers tend to refer to people much older than me, but my fear is still valid.
The fear finally forced me to start working out with weights. The fear and the fact that a new Good Day Pilates location has opened half a block from my Brooklyn apartment. Founded by physical therapist Clara Gilmour, the studio offers classes that include heavy-duty resistance bands and the occasional kettlebell to provide what Gilmour calls a “dose of reinforcement.” For someone like me, she says, a classical ballet Pilates class with lots of stretching may not be enough. “You want to exercise the muscles in a way that really pulls the bones and stimulates new growth. You need to exercise to the point of fatigue so the muscles and bones really respond.”
So now I go three days a week, sometimes four. Besides being so close, I loved that there were no mirrors in the studio, and I was able to convince myself that taking classes was undeniable medicine.
Is it effective? I might not know for decades, but wanting a second opinion—or just reassurance that I wasn’t on the verge of crumbling into a pile of dust—I called David Karpf, MD, an endocrinologist at Stanford University who specializes in metabolic bone disease.
“I really want every woman to have a baseline DEXA scan before menopause,” he told me. He explained that the test itself is an imperfect tool, especially for someone like me who has smaller than average bones.
“Let’s calculate your fracture risk now,” he suggested, rattling off a list of questions. What is my height, weight, age? When did I start menstruating? Has my mother or father ever broken a hip? Have I ever broken a bone? I could hear him typing numbers into a calculator on the other end of the phone.
He read the results out loud. “There’s a 99.2 percent chance that you won’t have a hip fracture in the next 10 years.”
Karpf explained that my previous scans might have captured just the natural result of smaller bones. “This is probably a good representation of your peak bone mass,” he said.
This is just an opinion, but I hung up and honestly felt like canceling my upcoming Pilates class. But that’s not the point. Even if the stories my mother tells may not be as inevitable as they sound, I should do whatever I can to counteract this folklore family curse. So I continued dragging myself to Pilates and gulping down calcium supplements while drinking coffee. One day soon, I may purchase an Osteoboost belt that will rumble at the base of my spine when I pick up my daughter from daycare, to which I have already started bringing a glass of milk.
