Growing Pains That Never Stopped

The Story

Stina’s earliest memoryThe ability to store and recall information. of her own body is of waking up with her calves and feet aching, rubbing them in the dark while her mother promised she would grow out of it. She didn’t. The aching followed her through elementary school, through her twenties, through pregnancies — always worst at night, always worse after a hard day on her feet. Decade after decade, the same two words closed the conversation: growing pains. Nobody asked why a thirty-year-old who had finished growing two decades earlier still woke with the legs of an aching child.

Bone is living tissue, and that is the key to her story. Inside every bone, three cell types share the work: osteoblasts build new bone matrix, osteoclasts dissolve and resorb old bone, and osteocytes — former osteoblasts trapped in the matrix — sense strain and maintain it. In a healthy skeleton, building and resorbing stay balanced, and bone is quietly remodeled without pain. But bone is richly supplied with blood vessels and nerves, so when inflammatory cytokines flood that tissue, the result is a deepAway from the surface of the body., poorly localized ache — exactly the nighttime bone pain children report. Stina’s “growing pains” were never about growthAn increase in size and number of cells.. They were an inflamed, over-active bone-remodeling system aching in the only language bone has.

From Stina’s chart: Since age 4–5: nightly aching in the feet and lower legs, worst after active days. Dx: “growing pains.” Plan: reassurance, “she’ll outgrow it.” She never did.