HAVING surgery is no small matter for anyone, but especially for Jo Butterfield. When she had an operation to have a spinal tumour removed at a Glasgow hospital in 2011 she was told there was only a 0.01 per cent chance of it leaving her paralysed. But the worst happened.
However, recent shoulder surgery has gone well, and two weeks ago, she was signed off for full practice again by her doctor, Professor Lennard Funk, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon and shoulder and upper limb specialist at the Wrightington Hospital in Wigan.
So long as there are no setbacks, the world and Paralympic champion in the F51 club throw could be back on a medal rostrum as early as the European Championships in Berlin in August.
“I just got signed off to practice again so that is quite a nice feeling,” says 39-year-old Butterfield, who was born in Yorkshire but moved to Scotland shortly afterwards. “I had a labral tear, and it was operated on in October. The whole shoulder was loose so it all got tightened up. I hate rehab, but a bit of it is always going to be in my programme from now on. If I can maintain the shoulder, hopefully I won’t hurt it again.
“The last two or three weeks I have been throwing, although it got a little bit niggly again a few weeks back, but that is just a typical athlete, going in too fast, trying to do everything the way I used to do it before.
“When I tell my surgeon that I had a 0.01% chance of being what I am after a spinal injury, he looks at me and says ‘yeah, I get you’. But Professor Funk is the best surgeon I have ever had. Yes it is daunting after what I have been through but at the same time I am doing all right after what happened. Part of me thinks if I can survive that and be OK I can get through a bit of shoulder surgery.”
Had the 2017 World Championships not taken place at the London Stadium, Butterfield would have gone under the knife before she did. Instead, much like Mark Dry at the Commonwealth Games, she threw in severe pain. Unlike Dry, she didn’t get a medal to show for her efforts.
“Had London not been there I would have had surgery before,” says Butterfield. “It was a case of ‘let’s hold off, it’s too big an opportunity to miss’. To come fourth in London wasn’t what I wanted. It was not what I want to be doing so I just want to forget it.
“But I guess as soon as I had done one throw I was pretty much in agony and just had to fight through it. The frustrating thing was that I probably threw better than pretty much every other girl, but the other three girls had one throw that was better than mine. Consistency-wise, my throws were the best but I didn’t have that big throw, that extra power, that bit of speed.
“Sadly the Gold Coast didn’t feature my event, it wasn’t there, I did try to wangle it as much as I could with the organisers to try to get it in there. Now I will keep pestering Birmingham to get it in there in 2022 instead.”
Recent surgery or not, Butterfield speaks with confidence of collecting a medal from Berlin borne of the fact that reigning world champion Zoia Ovsii of Ukraine is pretty much the only other woman in the field likely to be in the same stratosphere.
“The Europeans are my focus,” she said. “It is not a definite, but it is a
definite maybe, if you know what I mean. If I am throwing well, I want to go. There is good competition, the world champion I assume will be there, so it is a good competition, but there is not the same strength and depth as the world. It will just be the two of us, pretty much against each other. So it will be a good one to settle in.
“It is a good cycle, you are starting that off for Tokyo, you have the Europeans, worlds then the Olympics. The Europeans is where I started and that is now where it builds up again. As long as I feel when I start throwing fully that my shoulder isn’t struggling, I should be fine. I don’t think I will be throwing PBs straight away, but if I turn up and perform consistently then I would be hopeful of a medal.”
Butterfield only has admiration for Dry, the Commonwealth hammer bronze medallist, a man who could yet be at the European Championships alongside her as he awaits hip surgery.
“Mark epitomises that spirit,” he said. “No matter what else is going on, you have to give it everything on the day.”
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