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My scumbag Achilles.
I feel like we have a very poor model of how tendons work / become injured / heal.
Certainly the bog standard advice that your doctor gives you is completely useless. RICE (rest,ice,compression,elevation) is worthless for athletes suffering from tendonitis. Yes, even the R in RICE is bad. You can rest your achilles for 2 weeks and see zero improvement.
Here's the latest fuck you from my Achilles tendon.
After a couple years of quiet, my Achilles suddenly flared up playing tennis. The next day I am limping badly and despite rest (and eccentric calf lowering) this shit lingers for weeks. I can't really play tennis at all which is bad because I have a tournament coming up and I'm going to be playing several matches in one weekend.
Well, the tournament happened and my Achilles was - mostly fine somehow. I took two ibuprofen each day and I guess that was enough. Despite a huge amount of volume over the weekend, my Achilles is in the same state as it was last week, achy but not debilitating.
I've tried everything. Ice, heat/ice, voodoo flossing, eccentric calf lowers, stretching, rest. Nothing really works to cure the Achilles, although foam rolling the calves seems to help prevent further injury. In the end, my Achilles just suddenly gets worse or better for no reason.
One day, someone will figure out a treatment that actually works for tendonitis.
I very much relate to this. I have various off-and-on soft tissue injuries. They mostly seem to come and go for no apparent reason. I've seen doctors for a particularly bothersome one, got an MRI and blood test, only to be told basically, :shrug: I have no idea what's going on, there's nothing to be done. I don't think conventional medicine has much of anything to help with these sort of issues.
At least for me, usually working through it as much as I can is a lot more helpful than any form of treatment. I've had this with certain movements in my knees, one big toe (yeah, I know, weird, but it kind of makes walking tricky), one wrist, and I don't think anything else for a while. The usual pattern is that it starts hurting when I put force on it in some particular way. Trying to avoid putting any force on that joint, and most other typical treatments, doesn't seem to help much. It seems to help a lot more to try to use the joint as much as I can anyways, avoiding whatever specific movement makes it hurt the worst. Usually after keeping on it for a while, the painful motion just stops being painful.
It feels like this is getting a bit rambly, but I basically agree that we don't seem to have any real idea how tendons etc work, and that unconventional things like the use pattern I described seem to help more than anything with as little overall inconvenience as possible.
Yours sounds like it behaves more like an actual injury. Mine tends to feel better when I'm using it, and tends to flare up when I'm not using it.
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