WUHAN, China -- Madison Keys admits she may have to adjust her schedule over the remainder of the year after she struggled with left wrist pain during an opening round defeat at the Wuhan Open in central China on Monday.
The US Open runner-up needed a medical timeout in the second set of her 6-2, 7-6 (4) defeat by American qualifier Varvara Lepchenko, her first match since reaching her first grand slam final in New York.
Keys is scheduled to play in Beijing next week and may also represent the U.S. in the Fed Cup finals against Belarus in November.
"I have to see how it is the next couple of days," she told a small group of reporters. "See how it loosens up and feels better. But I have a pretty intense schedule right now. So we might have to go back to the drawing board a little bit on that."
It is the same wrist she had surgery on during the offseason in December last year. Having returned to the tour in March, she had a second procedure in May after the French Open to remove scar tissue and release a nerve from scarring.
"It's been better, but the good news is that there is nothing really wrong with it," Keys said.
"It's just lack of strength and unfortunately when you have surgery in the middle of the season, you don't really have a lot of time to properly treat it to the point of it being 100 percent again."
Although Keys said she had been dealing with wrist pain since she played in Stanford, California, in August, she stressed it hadn't been an issue during the US Open because of the extra day off in the schedule.
"We kind of all knew that until we had a big solid chunk of time to get to strengthen it all of the time, it's a difficult balance of how much do we do off of the court, on the court?" she said. "It's obviously frustrating."
Keys said she hasn't been able to do all the rehab work her doctors had ordered because of her playing commitments.
"I can't put in all of the time that I need to, because if I did, I wouldn't be able to move my wrist for two days and then I can't hit backhands," she said. "So it's trying to do as much as I can while staying reasonable that I can keep practicing and be ready for matches and things like that."
Still, Keys emphasized she wasn't risking aggravating the injury by playing.
"I can't really do any damage to it, it's just a really uncomfortable pain -- like nerve pain -- and obviously once you have nerve pain and it starts, it's really hard to calm down," she said. "It's just trying to do whatever I can to prevent it from getting that way."
As for reaching her first Grand Slam final, which she lost in straight sets to her friend Sloane Stephens, Keys described the experience as "bittersweet."
"The further I get away from it the easier it is to look at it," she said. "But it was an amazing moment and if you had told me in March, as I was walking out for Indian Wells, that I would be holding a trophy at the end of the US Open, I would have been extremely happy."