Osteoporosis and the L-shaped woman
Never Give Up an account of Eleanor Mills
Carrying groceries up the steps of her home in Toronto, she heard an odd crinkling noise.
Eleanor Mills, a 70-something woman at the time, didn’t know it then (the excruciating pain came later), but it was two vertebrae in her back being crushed.
Her bones were brittle from osteoporosis. But it would take more time, more pain and many misdiagnoses before she would eventually be told she had a disease that was stealing bone tissue and putting her at great risk of fractures.
Indeed, by the time she heard the word ‘osteoporosis,’ she was already hunched over like an upside down ‘L’.
And yet, her energy for educating other women about the disease fuelled her passion to organize walks in communities across Canada to draw attention to a condition that was receiving little money for research, says Judy Cline, a retired physiotherapist from Vineland.
At the time, it was common for women to have the disease a decade or more, and it was often diagnosed after a fracture. Treatment back then was limited.
In Cline’s new book, Never Give Up, she tells the story of Eleanor Mills and her determination to make a difference in the lives of other women.
She gives Mills credit for educating Canadians about osteoporosis, which eventually contributed to bone density test sites, improved diagnosis and more medications to better treat the condition.
Mills died in 2004 at age 90 of cancer. But much of Cline’s research came from newspaper clippings, reports and even a prolific collection of sticky notes on which Mills recorded her thoughts, poems and kept a record of moments of her life.
“When you met Eleanor, you never forgot her,” says Cline.
Her chance came in 1993, the first year of the community walks that became known as The Boney Express. Mills was 79 at the time, and they met at Catherine Street Park, beside Russell Avenue Community Centre and where the St. Catharines walk started.
Her propensity to talk while she kept up a brisk pace pushing her rolling walker, prompted one newspaper headline to refer to her as a “walkie talkie.”
On the outside, she seemed frail and vulnerable.
“She was like a little broken toothpick,” says her daughter, Helen Mills.
And yet inside she was a venerable force.
A woman who, after she was given a walker outfitted with wheels, never stayed still. Liberated, she was motivated to walk everywhere. In fact, she even insisted her husband drop her off several kilometres from their home in Toronto after her exercise programs, just so she could walk back to their residence, says her daughter.
“It was like a cork in a champagne bottle,” she says. “If you finally set it free, it bursts out.
“Being able to walk was profound.”
Mills herself described the experience of walking as akin to a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, says Cline. “I felt I could fly,” she had once said.
Mills never bowed to the conventional. She grew up on a farm in South Africa, where she wore dresses made from flour sacks yet learned to play Chopin on her mother’s grand piano.
“She had dignity and ethics, but she was never bound by normal constraints,” says Helen.
In all, she visited some 130 communities across Canada in the early 1990s during the height of her walks. She was a spark plug, speaking at community events, forums and on radio shows. Eventually, though, the walks dwindled and then stopped altogether.
As the years passed, her message was always the same. Maintain a good diet with calcium, walk briskly, and her signature phrase: “Never give up.”