The tale of two surgeries
The first surgery came after I noticed my hip was hurting and progressively getting worse in my first year with the team.
As an athlete, you try to push through those things, but this was bad enough that I finally decided to see the school doctors.
A torn hip labrum was the diagnosis.
I was obviously super bummed about the injury, but at the same time, I was able to kind of take a step back and remind myself that it wasn't my time.
Strangely enough, there was also this whole other side to me that was sort of craving that battle.
I don't want to say I was pumped up because I was injured, right?
Being injured is never a good thing. But there was at least some readiness there to embrace the challenge of working towards that big comeback moment.
Make no mistake, it was a brutal rehab process.
It's six weeks on crutches, followed by learning to walk again. Yeah, real fun stuff (not really).
It was a long recovery.
I had it done in April, and it was that next fall when I had recovered enough to step back on the court.
But as I was getting back into the swing of things, my left hip started hurting.
Back when I got hurt initially, I actually knew that both labrums were torn.
Since the left side was only a small tear and didn’t bother me at the time, we decided to only do surgery on the right one.
But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case anymore.
It was like the movie "Groundhog Day."
I was seeing doctors, doing another surgery and enduring another long and painful rehab process.
All. Over. Again.
But the second surgery wasn't filled with the same 'optimism and excitement' as the first one.
Something about that one was different.