Fatima Fernandez Cano thought she was going crazy.

In 2022, she was playing her first full LPGA season after qualifying with a second-place finish on the Epson Tour money list the previous year. But instead of playing like a star rookie, her game was unrecognizable. A strange sensation in the Spaniard’s right arm led to wild shots. There was no swelling, no bruising, no indication of an injury. She felt no real pain. Yet the arm didn’t work correctly. To make matters worse, the money in her savings account was nearly zero.

“I was completely lost,” Fernandez Cano said. “I didn’t even know which type of doctor to go to. Should I go to a psychiatrist? An orthopedist?”

Something was broken. She just didn’t know if it was her brain, her body or her swing.

Fernandez Cano, now 29, grew up in Santiago, a city in the northwestern region of Spain. Golf wasn’t the most popular sport there, but her parents, Fatima and Eduardo, played. The pair taught Fatima and her brothers Luis and Alberto the game and they all participated in camps and clinics at their local golf club until it closed when Fatima was a teenager because more land was needed to make the adjacent airport larger.

Still too young to get a driver’s license, Fernandez Cano got her motorcycle license at age 16 to get herself to a practice range. She played in junior tournaments in Spain about once a month. Despite the relatively small amount of competitive golf she was playing, she continued to improve and had the goal of playing college golf in the United States.

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Fernandez Cano worked with an agency that helps place athletes at colleges. After having sent them videos and statistics, they came back to her with an offer for a full ride to Troy University in Alabama. Fernandez Cano committed without ever seeing the campus.

“I should ask my coaches what they were thinking offering me a full ride. That probably wasn’t responsible,” Fernandez Cano jokes.

But they saw her potential. Fernandez Cano quickly became one of the best golfers to ever play for Troy. She won eight tournaments during her college career and turned professional in 2017. She went to Q School and earned Epson Tour status for the 2018 season.

That year, Fernandez Cano had three top-10 finishes and five top-10s the next. In 2020, she earned her first Epson Tour victory in California, bolstered by a second-round 65. She earned her LPGA card for 2021 but only got one start as the priority list had been frozen after the COVID-abbreviated 2020 season. In 2021, she was a regular in the top 10 on the Epson Tour, earning 10 top-10 finishes and was a ball-striking machine—hitting 78 percent of greens, 74 percent of fairways and driving the ball an average of 270 yards.

Fatima Fernandez Cano walks up to the green during the second round of the LPGA’s 2022 Kroger Queen City Championship at Kenwood Country Club in Cincinnati.

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Fernandez Cano graduated to the LPGA, expecting to continue her steady career ascent. Instead, almost immediately, her game unraveled.

In San Diego, at the JTBC Classic, she hit a nasty shank on a par 3.

“I was like, Oh, we’re golfers, we can hit shanks sometimes, it’s OK,” Fernandez Cano said. “But looking back, that’s when [the arm issue] first started. It was very, very subtle. I kept playing, and it kept happening more and more.”

When Fernandez Cano tries to explain it, she struggles. The sensation she felt in her arm was unlike anything she had ever experienced.

“It was basically a weird feeling in my forearm that started close to my elbow. It was not really pain. It was just a very weird feeling, like a tingling feeling,” Fernandez Cano said. “And then right after that, my hand would lose strength. I couldn’t keep the pressure down with my trigger fingers. I had no control. I would finish the swing and my club would be completely twisted in my right hand.”

It wouldn’t happen every swing, but once it started, it continued throughout the rest of the round. So if the first time it happened was on the 16th hole, she’d be able to find a way to finish the round. But if it happened on, say, the second hole, she was in for a long day.

Fernandez Cano saw physiotherapists. They checked her arm and hand but couldn’t find anything wrong. They checked her neck, thinking there could be a nerve issue. No issues there.

She kept playing. She kept missing cuts.

“I had no control over where the ball was going. I’d hit the ball 50 yards off target,” Fernandez Cano said.

That lack of control permeated her mind. She had joined the tour playing the best golf of her life. And now, she couldn’t even keep the ball on the course. Why was this happening?

She started having panic attacks during tournaments.

“I was walking down a par 3 and I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” Fernandez Cano says. “I felt like I needed to take all my clothes off because everything felt so tight, and I couldn’t breathe. The world becomes really, really small. In a way, you feel like you’re dying because you can’t get enough air in. That’s when they called the paramedics.”

Hyperventilating, her vision blurred, she was taken off the golf course. It happened again at another tournament. She saw a psychologist, and he explained that she was having anxiety attacks. When she explained the sensation in her hand, he said the two might be related.

“I thought I was going crazy because I was told that sometimes when people have anxiety attacks, they don’t really feel their hands,” Fernandez Cano said.

Fernandez Cano thought about it. It was her first year on the LPGA. That comes with a lot of pressure. Maybe she was feeling anxious at the beginning of the season. Maybe it was causing the problems with her arm.

Fatima Fernandez Cano at the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open at the Country Club of Charleston in South Carolina.

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At the Canadian Open in August, she realized she might have to quit golf.

“I was playing OK,” she said. “Then I wiped one way right. It landed in the kids play area. Thankfully there were no kids there. But the ball was right there, in the middle of the play area. I was like, Oh my goodness. It’s getting to the point that it’s dangerous.”

She lost her LPGA card that year, making only one cut in 17 tournaments. Back at Q School, she was playing decently, until she hit another wild drive 50 yards offline. She had to settle for status for the Epson Tour in 2023.

Fernandez Cano took some time off and was ready to start the season and was in good spirits. But the sensation returned. And with it, the wild shots. In May 2023, she was playing a tournament in Florida on a tight golf course. On the 16th tee, she realized she had lost so many balls, she only had one left.

“I was scared to death because I was like, this never happened to me that I had to basically withdraw because I don’t have enough balls to finish the round. Luckily, I finished,” Fernandez Cano said. “But I shot an 89.”

A rule on the Epson Tour cuts a player from a tournament if she shoots higher than 88 so Fernandez Cano wasn’t allowed to play the next round.

“That was probably like the absolute rock-bottom golf wise,” Fernandez Cano said. “I was staying at this house, sitting on the floor, laughing and crying at the same time, talking to one of my best friends. I’m a professional golfer and I just shot an 89. This is insane!”

Fernandez Cano figured it must be her swing. She called her swing coach, Eric Williamson, and said she had to come see him. After watching a few swings, Williamson told her that she should go see a different doctor before they break down her swing.

Fatima Fernandez Cano during the first day of the Ladies Italian Open in June.

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Three days later, Fernandez Cano was on a plane to Spain.

She underwent a nerve conduction test and an MRI. The tests were normal. An orthopedist in Madrid did an ultrasound and found some swelling. With cortisone injections, the swelling would come down. But she’d have to take three months off.

“It was the first time in my life that I did not play golf for three months,” Fernandez Cano said. She traveled to Spain with a carry-on bag but ended up staying for months.

At the end of the three months, she tried to play golf again. The sensation returned. The injections hadn’t worked.

“At that point, I was coming to terms with the fact that this is it. I can’t play again,” Fernandez Cano said.

The orthopedist recommended she see a doctor in Barcelona, but Fernandez Cano was so dejected, she didn’t set up the appointment.

“Then the first doctor calls me and asks why I didn’t go to Barcelona. So now I’m accountable. I go, I’m done with golf, my career is probably over, this doctor is my last shot,” Fernandez Cano said.

Fernandez Cano, again, explained the situation to the new doctor: “I said, I know I sound crazy, but I think there’s something wrong here, and he just laughed at me and he’s like, All of you guys that come to me with this problem explain it the same way.”

All of you guys?

The doctor did an ultrasound and knew where to look. He showed her nerves that had become pinched and the inflammation around that area.

“He said, I’ve seen this before. I can operate on you next month and the recovery should be like one to two months,” Fernandez Cano said. “I remember getting to my car at the airport and I just cried like a baby. It was the biggest relief of my life, just knowing that there was something wrong and that I was not completely insane.”

Fernandez Cano underwent surgery on Oct. 5, 2023, to release the pinched nerves. By the end of November she was playing 18 holes and in December she was playing in European Tour Q School. She earned her card and also had 10 starts remaining from her medical leave on the Epson Tour. By July 2024, she had collected a top-five finish in an Epson event. Last month she won the Guardian Championship in Alabama after shooting a final-round 67 to beat former NCAA All-American Ingrid Lindblad by a shot. Fernandez Cano finished the season with five top-10 finishes in 14 starts, and was ranked No. 3 on the Epson money list, which meant, she’d earned back her LPGA card for 2025.

“Part of me still can’t believe it because everything just happened so fast,” Fernandez Cano says of her post-surgery success. “My goal is to continue to have fun and enjoy it, which I know sounds stupid. But the last time I was on the LPGA Tour, I didn’t enjoy it. I was too worried about everything. I’m just very grateful that I get to play golf again. Everything else is just a bonus.”

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com