MY STORY – A LIFE IN BASKETBALL AND BEYOND
Woman’s Day reveals a captivating snippet from athlete Lauren Jackson’s biography about the pressures and pleasures of life under the spotlight as one of Australia’s finest female basketball players of all time – plus all the nitty-gritty bits in between...
I’d been playing with two stress fractures in my lumbar spine, one on the left side and one on the right side of my L5 (the fifth lumbar vertebra). The right-hand side was completely fractured, the other was more like a stress fracture.
I was furious that I’d been playing, because I’d probably made the fractures worse. I don’t know how I’d even managed to continue in that condition. I’d played through a lot of pain before, and I knew my body well enough to recognise when I’d hurt myself. So when I’d said there was something wrong, I would have hoped to be listened to, especially given that I was a veteran of the game – at this point I was 28 years old. I just felt like I was stuck, and there was nowhere to turn. As it turned out, this was a real turning point for me, it was a lesson. I was the only one who really knew what my body was telling me, and I felt as though I couldn’t trust anyone else to make the call.
Everyone in Australia was worried about me, I was a big part of the national team. I was committed to play in Russia, and I had other commitments to other teams. One of the hardest things about playing year-round was that I didn’t only have to worry about the team I was currently on if I got injured – I was playing for two or three teams each year, and I had to worry about each of them. An injury would impact all of my contracts, all my commitments, so I was always trying to weigh up what was right for my body as well as whoever I was playing for.
My family were also really concerned about me, they could see I wasn’t happy. I was sitting at my uncle Lyle’s place and I remember him asking me, “How are we going to stop you going back to Russia, how do we get you out of that situation?”
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