Walking on a Fractured Ankle: What My Own Injury Taught Me About Pain, Bias, and Misdiagnosis

I fell on my way out the door to meet a friend for pizza. I twisted my ankle, felt a jolt of shock, and like most people would, assumed it was a sprain. I stood up, waited a moment, and went to dinner anyway.

What followed became, without my planning it, a live case study in everything I thought I already understood about pain.

The Swelling You Can Watch Happen

Sitting across the table from my friend, I watched my ankle swell in real time, bigger by the minute. By the time we finished eating, it was noticeably harder to walk on, though I could still manage. My friend made me an ice pack. I was mostly just relieved I hadn't gone down badly.

As a nurse, I made a judgment call: the swelling was significant but starting to ease, I could still move around, and I live alone; there's no one to lean on day to day, so I've learned to manage myself. I got up and down the stairs. I made dinner. I made coffee. I carried on.

The Diagnosis I Wanted

Two and a half weeks later, I mentioned the ankle to my GP almost as an aside; I was there for a referral and some blood tests. The swelling was going down, I could still walk, but it was still painful, and I had an overseas trip coming up. He suggested an X-ray.

I was reluctant. My honest thought was: what's the harm in going, if it just confirms what I already believe, that I had twisted it, and everything's fine. That was the diagnosis I needed, and I think, on some level, I wanted it just to close the loop.

So that morning, still walking on it, I took my sticks with me and went to the gym for upper body strength training; it mattered to me to keep living normally. Then I called a cab to the X-ray department, expecting nothing.

The radiologist told me it was fractured. I had been walking on a fractured ankle for two and a half weeks. I had told every friend I had that it was "just a sprain, just needs rest." That weekend, I had gone to the beach and walked the sand in my walking shoes, pole, and jacket, determined to prove nothing was wrong.

The Walk That Changed My Perception

Here's the part I keep coming back to. After hearing the word "fractured," I still had to walk from the X-ray department to A&E, just across the road. That short walk suddenly felt genuinely, unmistakably painful, in a way the same ankle hadn't felt an hour earlier.

Nothing about the ankle had changed. Only the label had.

In A&E, I was seen first by a physiotherapist rather than a doctor, a system I found interesting in itself, where findings are relayed to a doctor who then directs further tests. I was told it was a fairly painful fracture, and asked, not unreasonably, how I had managed to walk on it for two and a half weeks.

Where This Gets Complicated

There is a substantial body of research suggesting that women's pain, and Black women's pain in particular, is more likely to be dismissed, underestimated, or under-treated by clinicians. Sitting in that A&E chair, I found myself turning that research on myself. In my own case, it seemed to check out: how does anyone walk around on a fractured ankle for two and a half weeks without it being excruciating, with swelling and mild pain the only signs?

But I don't want to settle for the easiest version of that story. So, I want to throw out a genuine question rather than a conclusion: is this really about race, or is it about something closer to individual variation in pain tolerance and pain expression, which may or may not track with race, but isn't reducible to it?

Maybe it isn't only a "Black women's pain" issue. Maybe some of us, of any background, are simply more able to push through, minimise, or reframe pain as "just sensation." And maybe that capacity isn't purely biological. Maybe it's shaped by generations of disadvantage, by the practical need to keep functioning regardless of circumstance, by not having space to be believed the first time, so you stop expecting to be.

If that's true, it raises an uncomfortable follow-up: how much of this is bias coming at us from clinicians, and how much is a pattern we've internalised, a felt need to minimise, to not seem dramatic, to prove we're fine, that operates before a clinician ever gets the chance to dismiss us?

The Diagnosis I Actually Needed

I'd misdiagnosed myself. As a medical professional, I decided my own injury wasn't serious enough to warrant urgent care. In hindsight, the swelling was severe enough that even an earlier scan might have missed the fracture; it only became visible once the swelling had gone down.

The treatment was almost insultingly simple: a boot, to stabilise the ankle and avoid surgery. And a week of doing essentially nothing. I cancelled my appointments, my days out, the gym. I sat still and let it heal.

That, it turns out, was the medicine I actually needed, not more toughing it out, but permission to stop.

Why I'm Bringing This to Journal Club

I am sharing this ahead of an August journal club on pain, bias, and misdiagnosis, because I think lived cases sharpen research in a way that abstracts alone don't. The literature on racial and gender bias in pain assessment is real, well-documented, and worth taking seriously. But my own experience has left me wanting to hold two things at once: that bias in how others assess our pain is well evidenced, and that it's worth asking honestly how much we have learned to under-report our own.

Maybe the more useful research question is not "why is Black women's pain dismissed" on its own, but "what happens when a pattern of dismissal from outside meets a pattern of minimisation from within" and how you even begin to separate the two once they have been operating on the same person for years.

I do not have a tidy answer. I have a fractured ankle that I walked on for seventeen days, and a lot of new questions.