I was in a lot of pain after the Olympics, but couldn’t stop. I had to return to Seattle, as I’d signed a three-year contract with them in 2011. I’d missed the majority of the 2012 season being with the Opals preparing for London, and still had the rest of the season to play—I had an obligation to the team.
Brian, our coach, was trying to manage me to get me through to the playoffs, but the thing was that my hamstring wasn’t getting any better, it was getting worse. I missed three games. It wasn’t going to get better until I had surgery on it. After returning from spending some time out trying to settle it down, I still managed to become the fourth WNBA player to reach 6000 points, in the game against the San Antonio Silver Stars.
The Storm made the playoffs against the Minnesota Lynx, but three of our team were out with injury, including Sue. In the playoffs we had one game apiece. I’d actually shot a three-pointer at KeyArena that took the second game—which we ultimately won—into overtime, but Brian knew I was struggling. By this stage I could hardly move, it felt like I missed everything I took, I was really affected by it. I couldn’t make layups, I couldn’t jump. The only thing I could do that was particularly physical was run backwards, that was the only pain-free movement I could actually make. In the third game, we were down one point when I attempted a buzzer beater, a shot just before the buzzer sounds, and missed. I’d always been known for my turnaround jump shot but that last shot bounced off the rim, a shot that nine times out of ten I would normally make. We lost that third game, and it was the end of the 2012 season for Seattle.
I was in so much pain, and in my head I was done. Physically, emotionally, done. I’d been that injured over the last two, three years—I felt like I was playing dreadful basketball, I was miserable. That last missed shot was just so indicative of that time in my life. Mentally I was actually in a really good place compared with how I’d been in Russia, but I went from emotional exhaustion to physical, and then on to being tired all the time, tired of being in pain.
I think I’d resigned myself to the fact that it was all coming to an end, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to play for Australia ever again after London, either. I’d also reached the point where I thought we could never beat the US, in my time anyway. Maybe it was time to go. I started talking with the national team about retiring.
I was still contracted to Seattle for two more years and I had the Canberra contract to finish. I took the hamstring injury into the Canberra season, and I couldn’t play, didn’t play, that season. I turned up at training to show them and Graffy was just like, ‘Try and run, try and jump, try!’. But I couldn’t run, I knew there was something going on in there. The doctors kept injecting me with whatever they could, I don’t know whether it was cortisone, anti-inflammatories, anaesthetic, I didn’t ask, I just put up with it. But I know that every time they injected this one spot, the pain would go away completely. There was something there, in that one spot, but the doctors kept telling me that whatever it was they probably wouldn’t be able to find it even if they opened it up, they couldn’t see anything on the ultrasounds. So I kept on with the treatments, and the pain, but still couldn’t play. I went to games, I supported my team from the bench, with one of the Capitals’ games even being held in the stadium named after me. We lost that game, and it was pretty frustrating not being able to just get up and play.
It finally got to the point where we had to make a decision about exploratory surgery because my ongoing injury was wasting everyone’s time, so in January 2013 I was sent to an orthopaedic surgeon based in Melbourne, Dr Young, to see if he could find anything. He operated and found a bursa, a sac of fluid, the size of a tennis ball, which was causing friction on my joint and pushing right on to my sciatic nerve—and he simply removed it. I walked out of the hospital on the following day experiencing no pain other than the wound pain from the surgery site, rather than that constant deep pain. I felt so good. I had my leg back, I could play again! My Storm contract had been suspended because of the injury, and although I’d told them that I wasn’t coming back the next season they retained the rights to contract me. I’d still have to rehabilitate my hamstring for three months, but I knew in my heart that I could get back on the court.
I was happy and relieved, but I was also pretty angry. All the advice I’d previously been given was to treat the injury conservatively, as the doctors couldn’t see anything, but it would never have fixed itself. If I’d had the surgery when the injury first happened, I probably would have made it back to London in better condition than I did, played with the Storm, then with the Capitals, and gone straight back to my beloved Seattle. That advice effectively lost me an entire year of injury-free basketball.