Osteomyelitis

In the innermost part of your body, deep in the bone marrow — where your blood cells are born, where the foundation of your body grows and renews itself — an inflammation is burning. Osteomyelitis. A bone marrow inflammation, usually triggered by bacteria that have spread into the hardest, most protected space in your body. There, where nothing was supposed to be able to reach. There, where the body guards its innermost core.

The symptoms are brutal: throbbing, boring pain in the affected bone, swelling, warmth, fever, often a general feeling of being broken. The body is fighting an intruder that has penetrated all the way inside. The immune system is running at full capacity. And the bone — the thing that is supposed to carry you — has become a battleground.