The injury basically tried to twist my foot off, a "tri-malleolar fracture with dislocation". Even after doctors reduced the dislocation and used plates to put the broken bones back together, the cartilage suffered too much damage and just withered away to nothing.
Arthritis is a miserable, debilitating disease. My understanding is that usually once the cartilage reaches a certain level of loss, there is a positive feedback loop where the remaining cartilage is under too much pressure to regenerate and it continues to degrade. I hope yours gets better or at least maintains.
In my case, replacement or fusion were the only options and I went with replacement (since fusion tends to lead to more arthritis elsewhere in the foot). Replacement looks like it will give me back almost all of the activities I used to be able to do, including most sports, except running.
Good luck. Taking care of a body is hard.