🩹 My ankle took 8 months, not 6 weeks

I sprained my ankle playing badminton 8 months ago. The physio said 6 weeks. Six weeks, he said, with a big confident smile, like it was a food delivery estimate. It's now 8 months and my ankle still clicks when I take the stairs too fast. I walk fine and nobody asks about it anymore. That's the strange part for me. In the first month everyone asked, "how's the foot?" By month 3 it was only my mother. Now when I wince, people say "still?" in a tone like I'm making it up. Meanwhile I'm doing the same exercises with a rubber band every night in front of the TV. They are boring and my cat watches me from the sofa like I've completely lost my mind. When I told people, everybody had their own story. A colleague's knee took a full year. A friend's shoulder from tennis still acts up after 2 years, he says. It turned into a small competition, each person adding one more month to the story. I came away feeling less alone and also a little worried about my own timeline. I play badminton again now, mostly. But I hesitate on shots I'd take without thinking last year. Sideways steps are the worst. My brain says no before my foot even moves. I can't tell if that's smart caution or just fear left over from the fall itself. I still don't know when I'm supposed to call it done. The physio says keep going.

Nobody ever really warns you that the mental recovery from a bad injury often takes considerably longer than the physical healing itself does, I flinched instinctively for months afterward on certain movements that had already stopped hurting weeks earlier according to every single scan and test the physiotherapist ran on me repeatedly during those long weekly checkups near my house.

Tore something in my knee playing a completely casual weekend match years ago and the doctor's own original estimate of just six weeks stretched out into nearly eight full months of slow, frustrating recovery before I could properly run again without noticeably favouring one side over the other during any matches at all after that whole long ordeal finally ended.