so when a bone is fractured there are specific steps of bone repair that occur in a general sense what I want to point out before we kind of get bogged down in the details here is that bone repairs itself this is a very vascular tissue it only takes usually four to eight weeks to to repair a bone as long as the bone is set properly so we're going to be looking at the four steps but I should say there's a Step Zero which is the realignment so the very first thing that has to occur is that the bone ends need to be set correctly against each other and it's not always helpful if you have for example a common uded fractor where you a common uded fracture where you have bone fragments um it's difficult to get the ends together so often times you'll need screws and plates and all the rest of it to make it happen but whatever they need to do they'll try to do it so that the bone has the best chance of healing possible so here we have a beautiful alignment of the bone you can see that the two bone ends are facing each other they have been realigned or whatever had to happen to get them close together and now we step enter into the steps of bone repair so we we're assuming that everything is aligned and properly formed together the first step of bone repair is called the hematoma formation this is where you have a large mass of clotted blood hematoma a growth of blood around the area this will be painful it will cause swelling in the region the second stage is called fibrocartilagenous callus formation you hear the word cartilage in the word there fibrocartilagenous um the first step of this is that there's actually a substance called granulation tissue that forms what's called a soft callus granulation tissue is a very fast uh growing tissue that often times is sort of a um a placeholder for uh further tissues that should be growing down the line and this is no exception you start off with granulation tissue and forms a soft callus then fosic cells begin cleaning up the area thirdly fibroblasts and um osteoblasts start to secrete collagen and you end up with uh a cartilaginous callus in this region so you start off with a soft callus in the form of granulation tissue you end up with highin cartilage growing in the region this also will be too large you'll see the co the collagen starting to kind of Bulge outward just the way the hematoma did originally so for some time you'll have an outward bulge that'll be sticking out of the leg or whatever uh area is broken the third stage what you'll notice has happened in the region here is that it's starts to look like spongy bone this is called a bony callus this is bony callus formation where new truli new spongy bone begin to replace the uh previous callus that was left originally by granulation tissue and then by highin cartilage so here we have our spongy bone and our very last stage is where you have it's called bone remodeling this could actually take some time depending on the age of the patient the Bon callus is slowly removed and compact bone or whatever bone is appropriate to the region will replace it it's possible that bone remodeling could take years it's possible that the bone will never regrow exactly the way that it was originally the younger you are when you break the bone the more likely it is for it to heal properly um but uh chances are good that you may have issues down the line no matter what your age is