Photo from Mount Royal, Frisco, Colorado.

"That is happiness; to be disolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." - Willa Cather

Monday 21 September 2009

I think I'm cured

For those of you who are just joining in, I developed some very painful, inflamed anterior tibial tendonits during the Trans-Alpine run. When it flared up badly on a run after 6 days of rest, I decided to take prednisone for the inflammation rather than Ibuprofen.

Sat. 50 mg prednisone
Sun. 50 mg pred - no running
Mon. 25 mg pred - ran for an hour tonight without a hint of pain!

It is almost too good to be true. I can simply find no evidence that I ever had tendonitis, except when I press down hard with my finger on the tendon.

Here is an anterior tibial tendon, which is not mine.




I'm done with the prednisone now and the effect has been good so far.


What side effects did I have?
Slight headache
Metallic taste in my mouth
palpitations

Since I only took it for three days, I luckily won't develop the long-term side effects.

I am not saying that I recommend everyone go out and get a prednisone prescription for all of their running injuries. But I also think it is good for doctors to be honest about how they treat their injuries. When SR suggested prednisone to Ida from Norway who developed the same tendonitis, I thought it was overkill. But then I thought about it a bit more. What my injury needed was a strong anti-inflammatory more than anything and that's exactly what prednisone is. Mega amounts of ice and ibuprofen that would work slowly, if at all, just did not seem like the best option. I would not do this for any injury, but felt with this one that the inflammation was harmful and seemed to be worsening. Hopefully I have actually protected the tendon and hastened the recovery with prednisone in this case. But, I would love to hear your thoughts, too. I noticed that I lost one of my followers today and hope I don't also scare the rest of you away :).

I will add that the injury deserves some more rest and I am not going to go all out with the running just yet.

Running Song of the Day: Touched by Cloud by Alberto Arcangeli

2 comments:

SteveQ said...

Good to hear it worked. The question is: will you now reinjure it, given that it hasn't had time to heal?

BTW, if you hadn't stated the obvious about the photo not being of your leg, I had a comment prepared. Good catch!

Helen said...

Hey girl - I need to read your blog more often - hadn't realized it was the same injury you're battling! Though I think a bit different as most of my swelling was up along my shin and not too excessive around the ankle. In fact no pain down low at all - but still some rather intense pain a few inches above the ankle in the muscle right along the shin bone. Glad in a way I didn't see your post on Vitamin P sooner as I might have tried it and ended up doing the race :)

Difficult to know what the best treatment is for this type of injury but I think everyone is different and you just make the best choice for yourself. I generally tend to avoid ibuprofen so as not to 'mask the pain' but I do think you need it sometimes to help lessen inflammation so the healing process can get kicked off. But for some injuries icing alone may be sufficient to achieve this.

But I'm no doctor!