Town goalkeeper Dean Gerken has revealed the full extent of the hip surgery he underwent in February this year which ruled him out for the remainder of last season.
Gerken, 33, is set to make his 100th appearance for the club on Saturday after being surprisingly recalled at the expense of Polish international Bartosz Bialkowski for the 1-1 derby draw with Norwich and then retaining his place for the subsequent games against Hull, Brentford and Bolton.
The ex-Colchester and Bristol City number one, who moved to Portman Road in the summer of 2013, recalled how he was required to face Leeds United in January this year after several weeks of inactivity, the after-effects confirming he would have to visit the operating theatre.
He said: "I think I’d trained twice in about six weeks before that game. I came in on the Thursday to get a bit of lunch and say hello to everyone. Mally Webster gave me a look and said ‘Bart’s struggling, I want you to do a bit with me this afternoon’. I thought he was joking but we went out there and he worked my legs.
"The next day Mally told me ‘Bart’s definitely a no-go’ so I trained again with the lads and thankfully managed to get through the 90 minutes on the Saturday.
"I didn’t really feel any pain but I was restricted. I was doing the basics that were required of me and luckily they went down to 10 men before half-time.
"We won 1-0 and by the end of the game I was asking myself if I should maybe steer away from having the operation.
"But on the following Monday evening I took my little boy to his football training and as I got in the car the hip clicked again, which reminded me that I probably did need the operation.
"I went from being absolutely elated after the Leeds game to down in the dumps again on the Monday.
"But now, touch wood, since I had the operation I’m good. It was touch and go whether it would heal properly but it seems to have done the trick.
"I did the Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday last week and that gave me a massive psychological boost.
"This is the best I’ve felt in five years, in terms of the movement in my hip and it being back to what a normal hip should be.”
Gerken went into more detail about the extent of the surgery, adding: "Earlier in my career, when I was playing week in and week out, I always had a bit of a problem with my hip.
"There was talk of an operation at Bristol, before I came here, but it wasn’t affecting me from one day to the next or anything like that.
"However, the more I played the more I was aware of it. It would click and almost lock, which made life very difficult at times.
"That was rare, like just once a season to start with, but eventually it was once a month. In fact, by the time I’d been here almost five years it was like a lottery whether I woke up with it or not.
"The problem was that there was crushed bone in there and my hip was an odd shape.
"Over the years, with all the kicking and landing on it when I made a save, it got progressively worse. It was so bad that when I was kicking I was chipping away at the bone, which I didn’t realise at the time.
"It got to the stage where it was no longer a case of if, but when, I would have the surgery.
"The surgeon ended up pulling out about six bone fragments from the hip joint, each of them about the size of an average tooth, and there were also 12 to 15 minute bits of bone that also had to be removed.
"It was a massive clean-up and it’s now better than ever, never mind being better than it was for the five or six years before the op.
"The difference in the amount of movement I have in it now is astounding.
"The operation itself was huge but there has been a lot of repair work around the area too. It took a while to build up the muscles and I feel my whole body is different to how it was aligned previously.
"I would say I’m in better physical shape than I had been in six years. I’d had problems since I was a kid but when you have played 100 games or more you are reading the game better and it doesn’t seem like a problem.
"There’s nothing structurally wrong with me now and I’m really optimistic about the future. I couldn’t be happier with the way things have gone.”