Alyssa Dalmagro spent most nights last fall squirming and writhing on a recliner, her left foot buried in a bucket of ice water and pain — unimaginable pain — throbbing, pulsing and shooting out from her left hip.

“It was really bad,” said the senior on the Slippery Rock High track and field team. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it was probably a 100.

“I could only sleep maybe two hours a night for maybe a month and a half. It was rough.”

The excruciating pain was the result of nerve damage in her surgically repaired hip — a rare complication from the procedure Dalmagro needed to correct a genetic defect that caused the ball of her femur to not fit properly inside the joint.

Her doctor, no stranger to the surgery, said he had never seen nerve damage like that before.

“It's very uncommon,” Dalmagro said. “My surgeon said it had never happened to him before.”

The surgery itself took five hours and required three large screws.

The recovery, though, would be a much bigger ordeal.

“I went to physical therapy,” Dalmagro said. “I had four nerve blocks, tons of medications. I was basically under anesthesia once a week for a month. Nothing worked.”

Finally, though, relief.

From something simple.

Prednisone.

The drug finally calmed the area, reduced the swelling that was pressing on the nerve and freed Dalmagro from her hell.

“I don't know how I got through it, but I did,” Dalmagro said. “My mom (Beth) works in the mental health field, so she helped a lot.”

Pain free again, Dalmagro was able to focus again on the sport she had fallen in love with in the seventh grade after she had to hang up her hockey skates because of her troublesome hips.

Track and field.

Dalmagro started out as a jumper — “Not exactly the best thing for my hips,” she said, laughing — before moving on to the throws.

She quickly took to the shot put and discus. Last season as a junior, she had the second-best throw in Butler County in the discus (117 feet, 6 inches) and the fifth-best distance in the shot (34-6¼).

Her skill offered her the chance to throw at the next level at Bloomsburg University.

But Dalmagro was focused on this season, her senior campaign.

During the first two weeks of practice, she felt stronger every day and felt like she was going to have a big year in the throws.

And then the coronavirus hit.

Dalmagro would never get the chance to put her recovery to the test.

“It was really difficult,” Dalmagro said. “I couldn't wait until track season started again and I wanted to get back to throwing and to do better. Then this happened.”

What softened the blow for Dalmagro was the fact that she knew she would be able to compete for the next four years at Bloomsburg.

Still, it stung.

Dalmagro is staying in shape and throwing despite COVID-19 restrictions.

She can't throw at the pit at the school, so she does off the patio of her Prospect home and into her backyard.

“I haven't broken anything yet,” she said, laughing. “I almost hit a tree, but nothing any of my discs haven't seen before.”

Dalmagro is working now to be prepared for the fall when, hopefully, she'll be able to take her throws to new heights at the next level.

And maybe try new ones, like the hammer and weight.

All the while, though, there's a ticking time bomb in her right hip. She will eventually need surgery on that hip, too, and hopes it won't be the ordeal the other one was.

Dalmagro hopes she can get through her college career before she needs to go under the knife again.

“The right is not as bad,” Dalmagro said. “Hopefully I won't need surgery on that one for awhile. I'm going to need it eventually, though — hopefully minus the nerve damage this time.”