“When is the doctor coming?” I asked, sipping at my milkshake. The strawberry was actually pretty nice. “I don’t want to sleep here if I don’t have to.”
“You just don’t like that the gown shows everyone your ass,” my mother chimed in, helpful as ever.
“You would think a place as fancy as this would have gowns that go all the way around,” Toni said. “And the nurse said the doctor would be in at nine, so any minute now.”
As though she heard, Dr Huppert appeared in the doorway of my room.
“I will pretend not to see your diet,” she began, with a tight little smile. One of the world’s leading Sports Medicine specialists, she came as highly recommended as any human person could be. She’d treated everyone from golfers and boxers to the world’s most expensive footballers. She’d resurrected careers that were supposed to be finished. It was hard not to feel like she held my future in her hands.
At least they were slender, tidy hands, with the elegant fingers I’d expect of a surgeon. She looked entirely put together, rather like we’d interrupted her Saturday evening. The shift dress she wore beneath her lab coat was black, elegant enough for any Parisian restaurant. Her coppery hair was pulled back in an elegant bun, diamonds sparkling at her ears.
“Congratulations, mademoiselle, on your record. Do you want the audience?” she asked me with a brisk gesture to my mother and Toni, clearly used to wading through the entourage of professional sportspeople. “I don’t want you moving more than you have to right now, or we’d be having this consult in my office.”
Toni moved ever so slightly, as though to leave, while my mother didn’t so much as flinch.
“They can stay,” I said. “Then I don’t have to repeat every word you say. Saves time. And please, call me Elin.”
“Well, Elin, I don’t know how to coat it in sugar. You’ve really done it this time. You mentioned the pain is different to last time, more intense?”
“Yeah, it feels like it’s coming from somewhere deeper. And it’s making my leg feel weak, like my thigh is trembling when I put weight on it?”
“If you weren’t so fit, with thighs that can, hmm…probably crack rocks, you wouldn’t have been able to walk at all. You see, you have not just injured the muscle this time, you have hip impingement. The ball of the hip isn’t fitting in the socket properly. So you get a lot of pain and much less movement.”
“Told you, you have great thighs,” Toni said, slapping me gently on the one on my uninjured side.
“You really should have come straight in, instead of staying to shake hands and all that. Anyway, your options. I assume that’s what you want to hear most? Skip to the important part?”
“Yes, doc.” This woman I liked. She could slice or dice me any way she wanted. “Hit me.”
“Surgery. Usually for people much older than you, but this kind of damage will only deteriorate. We put some metal in, everything fits again and no bones scraping. Which means no swelling, no pain.”
I huffed out a breath and leaned back against the pillows. Anything surgical meant a recovery time in months, not weeks.
“Will I be able to play at full strength after that?”
Dr Huppert lifted her shoulders in a gesture too elegant to be a shrug. “It is possible, but not likely. You’ll regain full range of motion and stop the pain, but high-impact sport like this? It could be too much for the joint to sustain. You could hit around with friends. I don’t think you could play a two-hour match.”
That landed like a bomb in the silence of the room. I had been expecting some damage, maybe a lecture about not playing like I was still in my early twenties, but not anything quite so bleak.
“Is that it? Surgery or nothing? You did say options.”
“I did,” Dr Huppert continued. “I know your schedule, that Wimbledon is barely weeks away and that you might have been counting on it. With plenty of rest, some permitted steroids and painkillers and a lot of physiotherapy, you could make it through to, say, August. But ideally, you would take up surgical treatment right after the tournament ends.”
“What about doing that until the end of the season?” I didn’t want all the pressure resting on Wimbledon, not if I’d be at less than full fitness. “Through the US Open, at least. Maybe not all the way to end of year finals?”
Dr Huppert shook her head. “No, your body won’t hold you up for that long. Not with the damage increasing by the day. Of course you will have complete discretion from us here. How you manage it is your business, but I can’t promise you beyond August. Even then you’ll be playing through the pain.”
“Thank you.” Was that the right thing to say? What did you say to someone who’d thrown your grand plan for happiness into disarray? I’d been ready to walk away for so long that I hadn’t realised how much I wanted the damn record in my own right. To know that even surgery might not mean I could come back? I felt like throwing up.
“I’ll leave you to think, but the staff will put your call through to me if you have more questions tonight. If not, we’ll keep on with the treatment plan and have a meeting Monday morning.”
“So,” my mother said as the doctor left the three of us with our bombshell. “Elin, what the hell are you going to do?”
Staying in the hospital drove me nuts, but it was definitely less of a threat to my privacy. Checking out of the hotel, all the chaos, I didn’t miss that one bit. Mostly, I wanted the time alone. Ezi came by to check on my treatment plan so she could make her own arrangements, but we were used to working in
