Eight months after a stray boot threatened to derail her Women's World Cup dream, Matildas goalkeeper Teagan Micah is finally feeling herself again.
The 25-year-old was playing for Swedish club FC Rosengard in the Champions League on December 7 when she copped a striker's trailing leg to the face.
The pain was instant.
"I genuinely thought she broke my face," Micah recalled.
There wasn't a fracture, but the concussion lingered - as Micah learned when she pushed to face Barcelona at Camp Nou less than two weeks later.
"I was still feeling like crap - I'd go out on a walk and I feel dizzy," she said.
"I tried to do 20 minutes on the bike. I've got off and you'd look at me and you'd think I'm drunk."
The concussion ultimately took Micah away from football for six months.
"It just was such a hard hit and I was really, really battling there for a couple of months," Micah said.
"A lot of the time I was bed-bound. Really bad headaches and dizziness and I had lots of different symptoms.
"It's been a really tough journey. It took me to quite a dark place to be fair - thinking 'will I ever be like normal again, let alone play professional football?'
The lowest point came in January, when Micah was back running in Sweden.
"I was all of a sudden getting really, really painful migraines," she said.
"I called up Brandi (Matildas doctor Brandi Cole) and said 'I feel like someone is drilling into my head'.
"I wasn't in a healthy spot. I didn't have my family, I didn't have my friends. I had another personal issue off the field, and I just had a lot of stress factors in my life.
"I was heading into a real deep, depressive kind of state."
With Rosengard's blessings, Micah returned to Brisbane to continue her rehab, including learning to dive for the ball again.
Australia's coaching staff backed Micah, who starred at the Tokyo Olympics, by bringing her into camp for February's Cup of Nations with no expectations.
For the goalkeeper, it was a turning point.
Micah returned to play in June - and has already copped an attacker's trailing leg.
"I'm thinking 'far out these bloody strikers, man - just jump over it!'" she said.
She also knows certain symptoms will take time to dissipate.
"It is overwhelming if it's a hard knock because it's hard not to go back to that fearful state of 'oh s***, not again'," she said.
"But you can't always live with fear."
Selected for her second World Cup, Micah is ready to fight for the No.1 spot she lost to Mackenzie Arnold.
"To get that call and get that confirmation - it's just so nice that they've just believed in me the whole time to get back to playing," she said.
"Honestly I feel better than what I was even before the concussion in a sense - because now I'm playing with a whole new sense of gratefulness."
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