It is a Saturday morning. I just got back from a hike with my husband, my daughter Sarah, and my granddaughter Emma. Stone Trail. The same trail I could barely think about climbing a year ago. Emma walked the first half on her own little legs. I carried her on my back the rest of the way.
I am 64 now.
One year ago I was at my kitchen table at 1:47 a.m., terrified I was going to end up like my mother. In a rehab bed my daughter would have to visit. Never coming home.
I didn't.
I went back for another DEXA scan last month. The numbers kept moving.
My hip T-score is now -1.8. It started at -2.7. My spine is -1.7, down from -2.3.
My doctor lined up all three of my scans side by side and looked at them for a long time before she said anything.
Then she said:
"Margaret, your hip is no longer in osteoporosis range. Your spine is heading toward normal. I have never watched a patient walk back this far without medication. Whatever you are doing — do not stop."
But that is not what I came here to tell you.
The biggest thing that has changed is not on the scan.
It is the fear I used to carry every single morning.
For 12 years — ever since my mother slipped in her shower and never came home — I lived with one thought sitting in the back of my head, every day. That is going to be me one day.
It is not.
I get down on the carpet with Emma when she wants me to. I pick her up at the school gate on Fridays. I caught her off the back of her scooter last week — fast, without thinking, without one second of fear about what it might cost me.
I am the grandmother I was afraid I would never get to be.
I am just... Margaret again. The same woman who walked 3 miles every morning for 12 years. Who lifted weights three times a week. Who took her calcium and her K2 and her D3 like clockwork.
The same Margaret I thought I had lost the afternoon of that phone call.
She came back.
I do not know how long your numbers have been sliding, or how many things you have already tried. I just know what it felt like to believe I was out of options — and to be wrong about it.
You are not out of options either.
Your bone-builders have been waiting all this time. They have had the bricks. They have just been too tired to lift them.
Give them their energy back. Start before your next scan — not after it.
— Margaret Bennett