What I learned from a sprained ankle

I sprained my ankle back in July 2017 showing off for some teenagers (wait, how old was I??).

It felt ok for a bit, I could still sort-of walk on it, but it hurt. And after a few hours it *really* hurt. Pretty soon I couldn't even touch my foot to the ground, it hurt so bad. I had to crawl out of bed and into the bathroom.

I read lots of opinions, professional and otherwise on the internet on how to handle it, and I learned a couple things that made it heal much faster than I expected.

(1) The first stage is inflammation -- this is where the body sends in "macrophages" to come in and devour the damaged tissue and carry it away -- for me, this translated into swelling and pain. But the swelling is good -- my body had to remove the bad tissue before it could start adding good tissue, and ice and anti-inflammatories would hinder that process. I took Tylenol instead of NSAIDs like aspirin or ibuprofen.

(2) The second stage is reconstruction -- muscle movement encourages blood flow, which is really useful for moving macrophages in and damaged-tissue out. I quickly realized that just laying in bed doesn't help that. But movement really hurt! So instead of creating my own forms of torture, I would try to move my foot and ankle around so that the pain level stayed below a ~3 on the 1-10 hospital pain scale. That way, it wasn't unbearable, but it kept the blood flowing to those areas. I started drawing the shapes of the letters of the alphabet with my big toe in the air, as often as I could reasonably stand.

Doing this, I felt like I recovered very quickly -- I injured it on Friday night, Saturday I couldn't put a single ounce of weight on it without excruciating pain -- but Sunday I was back on it, and Monday I couldn't feel the injury anymore and it was fine after that.

Obviously I'm not a doctor and your case may be different, but hopefully that helps someone out there.