The misdiagnosis

I’ve had a tennis racket in my hand ever since I was four years old, and in all of that time, I’ve never had a serious injury.

But physically, I’ll be honest, I just wasn’t ready for the leap from high school to college. There was a lot of training and exercising I wasn’t used to doing. So it was just this big shock to my body initially.

I started getting used to it after a few years. I was hitting my stride as a college athlete and began to get my legs underneath me.

And that’s when it happened.

It was fall of my junior year on the day before I was leaving for regionals.

We were just doing our normal conditioning routine when I strained the plantar fascia ligament in my foot. The injury basically happened from overuse.

I was in total shock.

Just like that, my regionals trip for the weekend was canceled, and I was shut down completely. I spent an entire month keeping pressure off my foot and doing physical therapy in hopes of helping it heal on its own.

That’s when I found out that I’d been misdiagnosed.

All of that work for an entire month—it was all for nothing. So I was back at square one. By this point, the frustration was really starting to set in. I just wanted to be back out there competing with my teammates. I was so used to always playing, and now, I was watching precious time tick off the season while waiting around on the sidelines.

I did my physical therapy every single day and eventually graduated from crutches to a walking boot and finally back to walking on my own two feet again.

And trust me, that was no picnic.

I basically had to practice learning how to walk again because I was too tentative to put pressure on my foot. I didn’t want to reinjure myself.

But at least I was ready to get back on the court. After being out for nearly five months, I was finally back to doing what I loved doing. I even won my doubles match in my very first game back. Things were starting to look up.

And then COVID happened.