I've come to the conclusion, not for the first time, that even if I never feel that disabling heel pain again, my plantar fasciitis is here to stay, and only my shoes are keeping me from heel pain.
My certainty about this reaffirmed itself just recently. A few days ago I decided, since I was going to do a lot of walking for the first time in months, to try out my newish, hardly-worn New Balance 576 shoes. My heel pain had been nonexistent, but after walking in these shoes for a couple of hours, I noticed that my heel wasn't feeling happy - that dull, throbby feeling was back. That night, I could feel the heel throbbing, so I slept with the Strassburg Sock for the first time in many weeks, and by morning the pain was mostly gone. One more night in the Strassburg Sock and I was all better again - with the right shoes on (in this case, my Birkenstock London).
I've been thinking about my experience with the New Balance 576s. Perhaps the shoes don't work for me because they are for a neutral gait, and my gait isn't really neutral. My spouse took a look at the wear pattern on some of my other shoes and thinks I actually supinate too much, which is even more of a paradigm shift than realizing that I don't overpronate. I'll have to experiment with that. It's a strange idea since, unlike my husband, I don't have a high arch, a hammertoe, or other traits I've learned from my researches are associated with oversupination. But I have suspected I was a mild supinator for many years, simply because when I'm standing still, I tend to want to stand on the outsides of my feet. So that's a possibility.
Or maybe it's not about pronation/supination at all - maybe I have an imbalance when walking that harkens way back to a back injury I sustained when I was a child. I've certainly been dealing with enough knee and back issues these last few years to make it a possibility.
Sometimes I wish I had medical insurance so I could see doctor after doctor until I got the answer. Oh, well.
In any case, I feel now quite acutely that if I want to be able to walk and exercise happily, I need to baby my heel as much as possible. That means staying sensitive to the slightest bit of "ouch" I feel. Although I say I'm healed up, what I'm really saying is I'm able to walk and stand without pain in some shoes. That's a far cry from total healing. I was nearly crippled for months; true healing won't occur for a long time, and complete healing, probably never, since plantar fasciitis is not so much an injury as it is a disease of collagen degeneration.
Have you experienced healing, only to feel it coming back? What did you do?
UPDATE: It's now Thursday, February 23 and my plantar fasciitis has been continuing to get better. I can walk barefoot sometimes. But a couple of months ago, I did go to a running shoe store and spend hours there trying on almost every shoe in existence, at least it felt like it, in hopes of finding a shoe that would be bouncier than my usual daily Birks and Haflingers so I could walk long distances fast.
And I couldn't find an athletic shoe that worked. The shoestore "expert" seemed pretty sure that my left foot (the plantar fasciitis one) mildly pronated and my right foot was normal, and that I needed a neutral shoe. My right foot also happens to be a size larger than the left. Because of both the size and stride differences, if my right foot was comfortable in the shoe, my left foot wasn't. We tried different arch supports, we tried no arch supports, and in all cases, it felt like each athletic shoe was biting into my left arch to some degree. We also tried shoes with more support, just in case, but those didn't work, either.
So now I'm going to wait to see what further healing will bring and if the world of running/walking shoes will open up to me again. As my latest exercise of choice is swimming, I'm not in as much of a hurry...
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