Enduring the pain for the love of the game

This is a basketball story. But it doesn't necessarily involve statistics, unless you can quantify desire.

The Medical Lake Cardinal girls, led by Northeast 1A League Most Valuable Player Jessica Lohman, has had another winning season. Watching Lohman play one would never know that getting there took no small amount of perseverance and determination.

"This is her year," Lohman's mother, Dee Dee said.

It's been a long road for the blond-headed, 5-foot-11-inch Lohman. Although quiet and reserved in casual conversation, put a basketball in her hands and she becomes a fiercely competitive, even ferocious player on the court.

You wouldn't know by watching her now that just over a year ago walking for Lohman was like walking on nails.

Lohman was well on her way to refining her already natural talent for the game as a freshman varsity player for the Clarkston Bantams when she started having problems with both her feet. They'd started going numb. Sometimes they burned.

"I just couldn't run," she said. "It kept getting worse and worse until I couldn't play effectively."

Initially attributing the issue to late-term adolescence growth, Lohman's parents encouraged their daughter to just get through the basketball season.

"Just deal with it, basically," Dee Dee said of her advice then. "We just thought she had some growing pains."

They bought Lohman new shoes.

But the numbness persisted. Lohman eventually saw an orthopedist. She was told there was nothing wrong.

The family moved to Spokane in 2017, and Lohman, who is partly home schooled, began taking classes at Ferris High School her sophomore year. By then the numbness in her feet had become so severe that she couldn't run, let alone play basketball. So it was a surprise to Lohman's parents when she decided not to play basketball that year.

"It had been part of her life since the third-grade," Dee Dee said, noting that her daughter had been playing Amateur Athletic Union basketball for most of her life.

Reality finally set in when Lohman announced, while she and her mother were out walking their dog, that she couldn't go on due to her numb feet.

They hadn't gone half a mile.

Running's one thing, Dee Dee said, but her daughter had to be able to walk.

Lohman's inability to even walk sparked a new flurry of visits to local medical specialists, none of whom offered a concrete diagnosis. One doctor suggested exploratory surgery. They declined.

They broadened their search for a diagnosis, let alone a solution. Testing continued in Seattle for a condition called Compartment Syndrome, where pressure in the legs restricts the flow of oxygen to the lower legs, causing pain. The test involves inserting multiple needles into the legs, then running on a treadmill while a meter measures leg pressures. This is done repeatedly to check various pressures.

"It wasn't that bad, actually," Lohman said, recalling the procedure with a shrug.

Doctors conducted other testing, including nerve tests. All were inconclusive.

Meanwhile, Lohman began receiving medical injections to offset the pain. It allowed her to at least practice her basketball skills at home. But her mom was frustrated.

"I was not getting anywhere with doctors here," Dee Dee said.

Lohman decided to play basketball anyway her junior year - to play through the pain just so she could play ball. Still, she made the Medical Lake varsity basketball team.

One day, Dee Dee learned of Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome, a condition where the tibia nerve that runs down the leg and into the foot becomes compressed in the ankle. Traditional treatment involves invasive surgery - making a long incision to access the area for repair.

They preferred less invasive arthroscopic surgery that requires only a small incision to allow access for surgery using an arthroscope.

Although there were doctors in Spokane certified to do the arthroscopic procedure, they lacked the many hundreds of hours of experience Dee Dee had been told by a trusted physician was necessary.

So she hit the relative transparency of the Internet and eventually found an arthroscopic specialist in Houston, Texas, who had the requisite surgical experience. Contact was made; medical records were exchanged.

They received a call the next day.

"Our doctor thinks she can help her," a nurse told them.

They booked a flight and were in Houston four days later. Lohman was scheduled for surgery two days before Thanksgiving Day, 2017, the day after an initial examination by the surgeon.

She was walking with crutches the day after surgery, mobile enough that the family caught a Houston Rockets NBA game before flying home.

"It felt really sore," Lohman said, "but I was excited to walk around."

For Lohman, recovery couldn't happen fast enough.

"I just wanted to get back to running and playing basketball again," she said. "It wasn't easy coming back from that surgery - it was tough."

Post-surgical recovery included physical therapy.

"It was kind of depressing," she said of the long months of injury and the surgery. "It was a major setback for me."

Her ankles remained weak from the surgery; her playing time was sporadic.

"But I kept pushing through it," she said.

That pushing included frequent street running, continued physical therapy to strengthen her ankles, and driving to Spokane to run the Perry Street stairs. She worked and trained.

And she kept playing. Lohman joined skills camp teams last summer in both Spokane and the Tri-Cities, and played summer ball in Medical Lake.

It was her passion for basketball that drove her, Lohman said.

"It's always been my thing," she said of basketball. "It's what I've always been good at."

And she keeps pushing through it. Even today as the Northeast A League's MVP, her ankles remain weak.

"This is really her first year of ball all season" without any feet or ankle issues, Dee Dee pointed out.

But like any team sport player, Lohman's focus is on the team and their next game.

Coming off a 11-2 league-leading season as first seed only to lose a heartbreaker championship game to the Freeman Scotties, the Cardinal girls are 3-1 in the post season and, after beating King's Way Christian, are on the hunt for a state title at the Yakima Valley SunDome.

"We have everything to lose," Lohman said.

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected]