PARS Awareness Campaign

For my Graphic Design Senior Seminar project, I was able to get in contact with the American Bone Health and will be working with them in designing a brand for an awareness campaign on the PARS stress fracture.

PARS is a painful fracture in the spine that often goes misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed all together. It occurs primarily in female youth athletes, but males too, from continuous stretching and bending of the spine.

There will be a fundraiser for the awareness campaign on April 23, 2011 in New York. Here is a letter from the girl who is hosting it:

Nia Yancopoulos - My Story:

Three years ago I was an eighth grader at Mildred E. Strang Middle School in Yorktown Heights, New York. At thirteen years old I was an avid athlete. I held every track record for the school, both boy’s and girl’s, and was playing basketball with the top high school and even collegiate players in the area. I pushed myself to and past my limits every day, never giving myself a break. By the spring of that year my body was breaking down and during one basketball game it snapped (literally).

My team was down six with seven minutes left in the second half when I pulled down a rebound. I jumped up for the ball but when I landed I felt something snap- pop- break. I tried running up the court but every step I took sent a searing pain from my lower back down into my leg. It was the first time I had ever cried on the court. My coach took me out right away. The trainer rushed to our bench; he told me to stretch and put heat on my back. He believed I had pulled a muscle. But as I was carried to my car and sent to the emergency room later that night, I realized there was no way this was a pulled muscle. I had broken bones in the past: both my wrists, a couple of fingers, but never had the pain been this bad. I prayed it was nothing serious.

The doctor initially found nothing seriously wrong, and ordered a month of no exercise. A month later, I returned to the season loaded up on painkillers and Bengay, the same searing pain running down my leg. I played one of my best games that year but can hardly remember it; I was in too much pain. My father took me to more and more doctors, trying to figure out what was wrong, but they all said the same thing: that they couldn't find anything and that I should probably just get weekly massages until the pain subsided. But it didn't. Finally, a doctor informed us that I had an inoperable tumor in my spinal canal that was the cause of all my pain. The doctor told me there was nothing he could do, that the worst-case scenario would be paralysis. My father refused to believe it and took me to yet more doctors, who all told us the same thing. They told me that unless I became paralyzed, I could continue to play as long as I could deal with the pain, that I couldn't make the condition worse. So I kept pushing through it.

That summer was one of the most painful for me. I woke up and played basketball every day, with my friends, with my teammates, but the pain never went away and I began dreading having to even walk. There were days when the pain was tolerable and days I couldn't get out of bed. I had to give up soccer because it was too painful to kick the ball; I had to give up running. All I had left was basketball and even that made me cry. Fall soon came. I was entering my first year of high school, and all I dreamt about was making the high school basketball team before it was too late. I woke up every morning to practice by myself, getting ready for tryouts. Finally the week in November came. Tryouts for the '07-'08 varsity basketball season began and I was planning to make it as a freshman, as proof to everybody that a five foot white girl could compete with the best and to prove to myself that I could get through this pain. But as the weeks went on things only got worse. The pain became intolerable, but I had no choice but to play.

When the coach talked to me after the week of tryouts and told me I had made the team I was ecstatic, and the pain subsided. But with our first Saturday morning practice it resurfaced. A week later my dad got a phone call at work from me, telling him that I hadn't been able to walk down the stairs. We went to one last doctor who had me take one last MRI. That night the doctor called our house with the results. He told us he had "good news" for us: the previous findings had been incorrect. I did have a large cyst in my back, but it was completely benign and not causing my problems. However, it had been obscuring what was: I had had two broken bones in my back all along, apparently due to my low bone density levels.

Shortly thereafter I was fitted for a full body cast and then ordered to 2 months of absolutely no activity. After this confinement I returned to sports. A year passed and I felt fully recovered, but something was still wrong. July 2009 I was rushed back to the hospital after collapsing on the court. After an injection of morphine and another MRI I heard devastating news: because of the false diagnosis and the many months playing on a broken back the two bones had not been able to heal. They had healed with fibrous cartilage rather than with bone and thus continuing to play basketball had put too much stress on the fracture site, and the bones re-broke. The doctors claimed there was nothing they could do unless I was willing to consider surgery.

I began the 2009-2010 school year at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York: with dreams of a new, pain-free start and a chance to get the years back physically that I had lost. However, on completing the soccer season and half of the basketball season the pain became to great. The surgery was scheduled and I began to mentally prepare for three months of rehab.

It has been a long road back: months in a body cast, even longer in physical therapy, a week in the hospital and now over two months of rehab, all in the hopes of getting back to the physical state I had once been, all in hope of doing the one thing that makes me happy, and that used to be my entire life: basketball. What gets me most is that all of this pain, delay and recovery – torture really -- could have been prevented. When you take a look at the athletic careers of today’s youth, you see more and more athletes in my situation: a pars fracture related to over work and over stress. It is my dream to spread awareness of this condition, to stress the importance of taking care of ones body. I want to spread awareness on the importance of healthy bones so that no other athlete has to go through what I did.