My third year of padel was a real mixed bag. I started out 2019 at peak enthusiasm for padel, and I wanted to train even more regularly and as similar to a pro as possible.
I approached Marcela Ferrari, then coach of number one player Fernando Belasteguin as well as Gemma Triay and Lucia Sainz, to see if she could mimic their training routine for an amateur player like me. It almost worked out until I got hit by a mysterious illness that really threw my plans off course big time.
All plans thrown off course
The situation was that after certain matches, I would get a high fever and be weak and bedridden for the next 2 days, then the fever would disappear and I’d be back in full fitness again.
As you can imagine, there were several problems with this situation:
- I had a newborn back home to take care of, and I didn’t want my wife to end up taking care of both him and me.
- I was worried about this fever, as I had never experienced anything similar, so I wanted to know what was causing it.
- The fever seemed pretty random, so I could not plan anything, much less daily training sessions.
This was around February, so I had to abandon my plans to train at Marcela Ferrari’s academy, and notify my padel partners and other coaches of the situation, and that I might have to cancel things at last minute depending on how things went.
This obviously led to a decrease in my padel commitments, as I didn’t want to leave anyone high and dry due to a spontaneous episode of fever on my end.
I visited several doctors and they had me undergo a ton of tests, none of them which led to any conclusions. As a side note, I learned that with private insurance, doctors have an incentive to have you undergo as many tests as possible, while with the public system, it’s the other way round. The ideal is to be somewhere in the middle, but unfortunately, the onus on striking that balance rests on the patient, as doctors are incentivized to do otherwise. I have to say that I felt very frustrated with the situation, as it felt like nobody was ready to actually listen to me describe my symptoms and try to see what diagnosis could be had.
