FORT MYERS, Fla. -- The mystery surrounding the Achilles tendon of David Ortiz and the longer-than-expected recovery from an injury that occurred more than seven months ago has taken the slugger on something of an odyssey to find answers. He has called, by his own account, just about everyone under the sun looking for answers, reaching out to anyone he's known who has had any sort of injury to the Achilles.

That search has put him in touch with a number of athletes, including Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard, former Red Sox teammate Gabe Kapler and a number of NBA players, including retired superstar Shaquille O'Neal. But their Achilles injuries all involved complete ruptures that ultimately necessitated surgery. None of those athletes dealt with anything quite like what Ortiz has faced, chiefly ongoing discomfort but something short of a tear.

But while Ortiz found few direct parallels to his own circumstance, one may have found him. On Thursday, former Red Sox star Dwight Evans approached Ortiz with a message of (kind of) hope, suggesting that he'd dealt with discomfort in his Achilles over roughly the final five or so years of his career.

While Evans was unfamiliar with the precise nature of Ortiz's Achilles injury and how closely it aligned with his own, there are nonetheless commonalities that suggest that interpreting the current Sox slugger's deliberate pace of recovery as a cause for panic might be premature.

Evans said that he started feeling the discomfort in his Achilles -- which he characterized as a constant dull throbbing -- around the age of 34, and that it remained with him until a couple of years into his retirement. That makes his on-field accomplishments all the more eye-opening.

"It never left me. But, I could deal with it," Evans -- in Fort Myers to work with Red Sox minor leaguers -- explained on Friday. "It's not so much playing with pain -- it's being able to play with pain and produce. That's the key."

Evans (who noted that former Sox teammate Carl Yastrzemski also dealt with Achilles pain in the later stages of his career) turned in one of the best years of his career at a time when he was managing the injury. In 1987, at age 35, he hit .305 with a .417 OBP, .569 slugging mark, 34 homers, 123 RBI and 106 walks in 154 games while earning both an All-Star nod and fourth-place in American League MVP balloting. From his age 35 season in 1987 until his retirement following the 1991 campaign, he hit .283/.387/.470 while averaging 19 homers, 87 RBI and 135 games per year.

His advice to Ortiz?

"He should be trying to get it healthy, trying to get it right. With an injury like that, you hate to see him trying to get it going in spring training," said Evans. "He wants to play. But why punish it down here if it's not 100 percent?"

Evans suggested that, in his case, the need to address the injury was constant, and virtually daily. He had to ice almost every day and, at times when the pain became intolerable, he would get pain-killing injections in order to offer him a reprieve. Those carried considerable risks, Evans noted.

"The Achilles is so dense. When they inject it, it kind of splits the Achilles. You're firing juice into something so dense, and the juice has got to go somewhere so sometimes it splits," he said. "The medical advances and technology today are so far superior.

"You can get it loose. Ice was my friend. The next day was hard, but you learn to deal with it. You just learn to deal with it."

Ultimately, the effort to manage the injury was relatively successful. There were times later in his career when Evans' playing time was circumscribed by his Achilles. It was painful, he said, to stop and start while running, and he had to make efforts to keep the region loose throughout the game after a lengthy daily process to prepare to play.

But the worst-case scenario of a rupture that would require surgery -- such as the ones suffered by Howard in 2011 and Kapler in 2005, along with Evans' former teammate, pitcher Fergie Jenkins, in 1976 -- never occurred.

"It doesn't get much worse. Mine didn't," said Evans. "It never tore. I played with Fergie Jenkins -- saw some guys throw a pitch, run to first base and go down like someone shot them, tore his Achilles right off. Yaz obviously didn't tear his and I didn't tear mine. It was just a pain factor."

For now, that appears to be the case with Ortiz as well. On Friday, manager John Farrell explained that Ortiz's lingering soreness "is part of getting back in shape and it's volume and intensity related. There isn't the thought of any kind of re-injury or injuring anymore than what was sustained last year."

Now, at least, in Evans, Ortiz has a model for a player who dealt with something similar and who ultimately proved capable of performing at levels that approached (and, in fact, in some ways exceeded) his career norms. For those around the Sox who seem to grow more anxious by the day about the unresolved status of Ortiz's injury, such a case would appear to be one of the more promising indicators in the more than half a year in which the slugger has been working to make it back to games.