"I'm confident things will go well" - Nadal breaks down Roland Garros triumph with the injury

| by Drew Tate

Rafael Nadal won the Roland Garros without any sensation in his left foot due to repeated injections to numb the pain.

Speaking with the Spanish media following the triumph, Nadal broke down some of the things that were unknown at the time. He opened by explaining how he felt after round two:

"I was limping badly. I still hadn’t injected my nerve. From there, we came to the conclusion that I couldn’t keep injecting myself where I had been because it was continuing to get worse. We made the decision to inject the nerve at a distance, and that was a good decision. If we hadn’t done that, we would never have got to this point."

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On the injections Nadal added:

"It’s not an exact science, but it tends to last about seven or eight hours. Yes, it hurts. It’s bearable, but doing that 20 minutes before going out on court every day... it isn’t nice, honestly. You have control of your foot, but there is no sensation. There may be a little more risk of twisting your ankle. The way I’m playing, with a numb foot, it doesn’t matter if there’s less feeling because I go from limping to being pain free."

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Up next for him a new type of treatment:

"The goal is clear; to carry out pulsed radiofrequency on the nerve to try and achieve the sensation I have when I’m playing with a numb foot. We’re trying to make that permanent. If it works, we’ll remove the sensitivity from the sensitive part of the foot. And there’s another significant factor; we’ve shown that I can play with the distance blocking. If we can get this treatment to work, permanently affecting the nerve, I will be able to keep playing. I’m used to taking things step by step. I’m confident things will go well."

Nadal also said he is not considering retirement and is not worried about what comes after tennis. He admitted that there are many things outside of tennis that make him happy and the foot pain can be fixed easily with an operation. The problem at the moment is that ends his career instantly.

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