DISCLAIMER: I plan to bring this up to my doctor at my next visit. But in the meantime…
About a year ago I was walking down some stairs. I’m unclear on what happened next, but the next thing I remember was lying on the ground screaming and holding my ankle. I hobbled around for a few days and was eventually able to fully walk again after a week-ish.
A year later, it still hurts from time to time.
Am I going to have to deal with this the rest of my life?
Depends on how long you live. 
Actually, you have the right idea with the disclaimer. Nobody on this board can give you a prognosis about a specific injury.
IANAD, just personal experience and stuff I’ve been told by doctors and physical therapists. Soft tissue injury, as opposed to bone injury, can take a very long time to heal. Things like tendons don’t receive the robust blood flow that other tissues do.
You’re right to ask a real M.D. All kinds of things are possible. For example, it’s possible that a physical therapist could teach you exercises to strengthen surrounding muscles so as to avoid further stress on the injured thing, whatever it is.
Focusing on MY injury, I broke my ankle 8 years ago. Had metal plate inserted. Then another minor surgery to clean it up a bit. I can do most everything I could, but yes. It still hurts now and then. Likely will for the rest of my life. Broken bones from when I was 8 are healed, as an adult? No way it’ll ever be quite the same.
And you can break your ankle in such a way that you can walk on it. I wasn’t one of the lucky ones like that, but I’ve had friends who got walking casts with ankle injuries. You may have broken yours, but no way to tell without xrays.
Anecdotal response -
When I was a lad of 12, I ran down a hallway and failed to notice the short flight of stairs at the end. As I ran out into mid-air like Wile E. Coyote, I tried really hard to make it to the landing, but landed on the edge of the last step - right on my arch. :eek:
It was not broken, but really badly sprained. That injury plagued me for YEARS…
YMMV.
Maybe you have gout, my husband had an ankle injury that would not heal. Now he’s on gout meds and his ankle is fine.
mine still gives me trouble, xrays were negative for fracture at the time, but my current ortho says my symptoms are consistent with an occult fracture, YMMV
I play rugby. I’m not sure which of my injuries are from last week, last month, last season, or last year, so I couldn’t tell ya.
I sprained the hell out of my ankle a few years ago, the classic high ankle sprain, and the damn thing still gives me a little trouble. Its not so much that it hurts regularly just that it’s a little more apt to get tweaked again when I do something. Sort of like the once separated shoulder.
I had a similar situation about 18 months ago. Turns out when the ligaments tore with the sprain they didn’t heal properly, and were now too loose, causing my ankle joint to jiggle around. I ended up needing surgery to fix it. Doc told me if I left it alone I would have arthritis in the ankle within a decade (I’m 28)
He also said if it was less severe it could have been helped w/ physical therapy. He also told me it’s pretty common for people to neglect a sprain and have this happen. One should always get proper medical treatment for a sprain-- and to beware of doctors in the ER/Urgent Care who will check for a break and then blow you off when it’s clean. (Since I’ve been operated on, I’ve got orders to come see him with any twisted ankle that swells at all, or hurts to walk on more than 24 hours)
Go see your Doc. If your GP blows you off, go see a podiatrist or orthopedist.
It’s kinda creepy how much this post sounds like something I would write.
I spent about a month wearing a pharmacy bought ankle brace, before I could walk properly. However, it still hurts (and it happened right at the beginning of April, last year). I will be going to the doctor within the next month and it will definitely come up. If this injury is anything like my old elbow injury, it will hurt for years and years.
With the elbow injury, I was running up a flight of stairs in a mall and I tripped. Almost all my weight landed on my right elbow. I am double jointed. So, if I hyper-extend my elbow, I still get screaming pains radiating from my elbow to my hands and my shoulder. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those double jointed people who ever learned to control it. I end up in pain at least twice a day. This injury happened when I was 19, so about 9 years ago. Oh, and weather changes still make my ankle and my elbow hurt. Yesterday, it was in the high 40°’s and rainy. Today it’s cold, clear and windy. Both have been throbbing almost non-stop.
Yet another anecdote:
About 10 years ago, I fell off a bus and heard something crack in my ankle. I was rushing home and trying to make my connecting bus, so rather than doing something intelligent like staying put or seeking medical attention, I hobbled to my bus stop and then limped home on what was very likely a broken ankle. It was swollen, bruised, and painful. I waited a couple days, and it didn’t worsen, so I kept it on ice for a week. I saw a doctor eventually, who agreed it had probably been broken, and recommended some PT to strengthen the joint.
It still hurts from time to time. If I step off a curb funny or onto uneven ground, a mild bolt of pain will shoot through my ankle. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the original injury, but it’s usually enough to make me wince.
Hey Homie, if you haven’t figured it out yet from these examples, let me spell out the sad news:
Doctors can’t fix everything, and some things that heal will bother you forever.
It has always been true that kids and young adults think they are indestructible. If they do get hurt, they think, they’ll get patched up and they’ll be good as new. For some lucky ones, it’s even true. For the rest of us, we’re reminded of the damage now and then. Some of us have tried all the NSAIDs, and we’ve found the one that works best for/gives the least side effects for us. Some of us can predict the weather by our “healed” parts. Many of us can walk without limping most of the time.
After a series of ankle sprains from racquetball and running, my doctor told me to stop before I seriously fucked up my ankles. I never run, unless I’m trying to cross a street without getting run over. My damaged ankles tend to over-supinate, so even a short trot is an exercise in concentration and fear. Falling down with a turned ankle in front of a big truck is really bad form. :eek:
What everyone else said.
When younger, I sprained both of my ankles pretty severely, with the result that they seemed to readily re-sprain over a period of a few years. But, as far as I can tell, 20 years later I have no long-term residual effects from those.
As I near 50, however, I am starting to develop arthritis in many of the places where I broke bones. And when I’ve had surgery to correct my knee or foot, I sure don’t recover back to anything like full, unencombered function.
There’s nothing like exeriencing ankle pain outta the blue, and feeling like you should be in a rocking chair on a porch somewhere, commenting that the barometer must be a-changin’ and predicting a comin’ change in the weather!
I was told by a Doc, as i do not believe in a family doctor, anyway I was positive I had broken my ankle as the pain was much worse than any other recent injury, Anyway he said an ankle sprain can be more painful than a break, Just about the time we think it is better, we aggravate it again. It was a constant bother for way better than a year. If you are over forty it would be cheating to get better sooner 
I had a diagnosed soft tissue injury in my foot – I had x-rays, even an MRI, because it hurt so much I was sure something was broken – turned out to be generic “tendonitis”. Sucker hurt on and off for at least a year. My doctor assured me that it was normal as long as the pain wasn’t getting worse, and that if I would rest/ice/compression/elevation as much as possible when I was having pain it might heal faster. (yeah, right… if I’d had time to do that it might have healed correctly to begin with, ha!)
Basically, you’re screwed. I tore mucho ligaments in my left ankle playing soccer in college, and the ankle, even after surgery, was visibly different from my right ankle. For about a year afterward, I would sometimes suffer shooting pains while walking that would force me to sit down. Turned out those were some bone fragments that it would have been majorly invasive (i.e., not worth the trouble) to remove. They eventually got surrounded by scar tissue and don’t hurt any more. But now, 15 years later, if I walk a mile or more my left knee stiffens up (and sometimes my left hip, too)–I guess the mechanics of my gait is off enough that my other joints are starting to suffer, too. And I’m all of 36.
So **AskNott ** is absolutely right about the moral of this story.
Thank your lucky stars you are not a horse.