A WNBA star described 'spitting up blood' and losing 32 pounds due to lingering impact of COVID-19

• Asia Durr may see her WNBA career end prematurely due to lingering effects from COVID-19.
• In an HBO "Real Sports" interview, the New York Liberty star described struggling to breathe and "spitting up blood" upon her June 8th diagnosis.
• In the seven months since, the 23-year-old has lost 32 pounds, struggled to get out of bed, and "can't even shoot a free throw."

COVID-19 is no joke, even for the healthiest among us.

Take it from Asia Durr, the second overall pick in the 2019 WNBA Draft and a budding star for the New York Liberty. The two-time ACC Player of the Year at Louisville may see her professional basketball career come to a premature end at just 23 years old thanks to the lingering effects of the novel coronavirus. She already missed the entirety of the 2020 WNBA season.

In a recent interview on HBO's "Real Sports," Durr described struggling to breathe and "spitting up blood" upon her June 8th COVID-19 diagnosis.

"It was just lung pain that was just so severe," she said. "It felt like somebody took a long knife and was just stabbing you in your lungs each second. I woke up, 2:00 in the morning, vomiting, going back and forth to the bathroom. I couldn't keep anything down."

Durr added that she's "lost 32 pounds" since contracting the deadly disease. According to her profile on the WNBA's website, her normal playing weight is 151 pounds. At 5-foot-10 and now 119 pounds, Durr's BMI of 17.1 leaves her significantly underweight, per the National Institute of Health's parameters.

She hasn't even tried picking up a basketball in the seven months since her initial diagnosis.

"I've talked to doctors, and they told me I'm not cleared yet," she said. "I'm not cleared to do anything physically which could cause flare-ups."

"That's what's really hard for me because in life, whenever something was hard, I would go and play," Durr added. "I can't even do that now. I can't even shoot a free throw."

Durr admitted that she's considered the very real possibility that her career is over. The question has "crossed my mind plenty of times," she said, but as she wrote on Twitter following the interview's airing, she's "gotta keep fighting. Only choice."

Check out the clip of Durr's interview on HBO's "Real Sports" below: