![Fosamax and Femur Fractures: "A Terrible Ordeal"](/images/articles2/fosamax_broken_femur-(168x252).jpg)
"She rang the bell at around 1:00 am and I jolted out of bed. I must have missed a step because I fell down three stairs from the second floor to the landing. It wasn't a big fall. I didn't tumble and it wasn't from high up. But I felt something bad had happened. From the way my right leg was laying there, I just knew that I had broken something. It was incredibly painful.
"My husband came out to help me and he tried to move me, but I said, 'Don't move me, I think I've broken my leg. Call an ambulance.' But we were out in the country and it was the middle of the night, so it took an hour and a half for the ambulance to get to me. I had to stay in that position on the landing for a long time before the ambulance got to me.
"It was a small hospital but the doctors were wonderful. I stayed at the hospital a couple of weeks and they did surgery—I still have the scar—to put a metal plate in my leg. The doctors looked at it and told me my femur had snapped. After a couple of weeks I was able to move back to Montreal, but I had months of physiotherapy.
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"About a month and a half later, I learned to walk with crutches and then later with a cane. Now I have a bit of a limp, mainly from compensating for the break. I'm lucky both femurs didn't snap when I fell.
"I read a while ago that Fosamax might cause the femur to snap. It's one thing to ski and have an accident that breaks your leg. But it's another thing to think that a medication you took to strengthen your bones might actually have the opposite effect. It makes you wonder about the drug because it was supposed to strengthen my bones. It was a terrible ordeal."