A 38-year-old man rolled his ankle during a football match and went to the hospital with a painful right foot. It looked like a textbook inversion sprain.
The first two X-rays, the standard front and side views, showed nothing. It was a third image, taken at an oblique angle, that produced the alarming finding: a small, well-defined piece of bone sitting next to the front of his heel bone, exactly where an avulsion fracture would appear.
