He was resilient and had bounced back from injuries before. Sure this was the first time he needed an operation, but Ryan O'Keefe thought he knew the process: get it done, do some rehabilitation and, viola, back to training. Call it a rookie patient mistake.
Having struggled his way through 2010, O'Keefe was booked into hospital for groin surgery as soon as the Swans' season was done. A snip here, a bit of tightening there, good as new?
''I saw the surgeon beforehand and he had the scans and knew the symptoms, I had done the tests he put me through, and he told me this is what we have to do,'' said O'Keefe, who makes his 2011 debut tonight against Collingwood at Etihad Stadium. ''Because it was my first surgery, I never really thought about how I'd feel afterwards. I just sort of agreed with the surgeon and said: 'OK. Whatever it takes to get it fixed.'
''The surgeon called it a groin reconstruction. I had to have the adductor done, the hernia done, and the conjoint tendon done. It was the full box and dice. Everything that was part of the groin, I had to get done.
''Everyone said it was pretty major and you won't be able to do much, but I just thought in the past I'd been pretty resilient and bounced back pretty quickly, and thought I'd be right. I didn't realise until a couple of days after surgery when I couldn't move out of bed, it was going to be a long process.
''The first couple of weeks I could hardly move, then after that just very slowly, just trying to walk normally for a while and that took a little bit of time, then once that started I was able to get on a bike then start to do some light jogging. Once you're running then it's starting to change direction, and then it was speed and power stuff. I've been working on that pretty fiercely the last couple of weeks.
''I've been pretty lucky to play 11 years and over 200 games, and to have first surgery now, I've got no complaints. I played with a lot of guys who have been riddled with injuries and had many operations and to have a bit of a frustrating year like I had, you can put it into perspective. It's really not that bad.''
O'Keefe's 2009 season in Sydney had been his best and his reward was the club's best and fairest. He planned to build on that in 2010 but an incident at pre-season training in January last year would be the trigger for frustration.
''My groin was starting to get a little bit sore and then the incident during training aggravated it more than usual,'' he said. ''I had a couple of weeks off and came back and it was good during the pre-season games. The first round it was feeling good, and then in round two against Adelaide I pulled up really sore and then from then on, I had to endure three or four weeks of it being quite sore, then have one good week, then two or three bad weeks, and so on.
''What ends up happening is you can't train during the week and as a result you just slowly keep going down and down in your fitness and you lose your speed, and I couldn't really kick, that's why I was kicking a lot on the right foot and handballing the ball off a lot. You just slowly deteriorate and then by the end of the year I asked the coaches to just give me a job to play on someone so I could still contribute.
''I felt if I was still doing my part, I was still worthy of my spot in the team but it was frustrating that you can't play at your best or push your body to where you want to. But all along I did say, 'If you feel I am no good for the team, I'm happy to sit it out.'
''It was a really good learning year for me and I got a lot out of it. I developed a lot of other areas of my game, like leadership and being able to teach younger players things. It has made me wiser and improved me.''
O'Keefe missed just one match when rested in round 21 and despite being clearly restricted, still managed to do his job every week. But following his operation, there was one task he couldn't complete.
Earlier in the year he had planned a 500-kilometre bike ride around Vietnam with former teammate Jared Crouch to raise money for the Oncology Children's Foundation.
''I was lucky I was still able to go over there and sit in the [support] van,'' he said. ''It would have been good to get out there on the bike and do it with everyone else, but it was something quite different for me. I did the 500km in the van with a Vietnamese driver. We got along really well, he didn't speak a word of English and I didn't speak a word of Vietnamese, but we got this communication thing going on and it was quite good.
''Crouchy and I will try and organise another bike ride this year and hopefully this time I can do it on a bike.''
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