For two months, Trevor Story couldn’t sleep.

On April 5, the Red Sox shortstop had fractured the glenoid rim in his left shoulder laying out for a catch in Anaheim. Standing in the clubhouse at Fenway days later, he tearfully announced that he needed shoulder surgery. Both he and the club expected that his year was over, after only eight games.

Story embarked upon the months-long recovery, but hit an immediate roadblock.

“I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t sleep for two months,” he told the Herald on Saturday afternoon.

Sleep is crucial to healing. It’s the time when the body repairs and grows the tissue in the body broken down by cortisol, the stress hormone.

It was as if Story’s body didn’t want to heal. Or, he worried, perhaps something had gone wrong in the surgery.

“Just pain, just constant pain the whole time. That’s why it was so scary in the beginning,” he said. “You kind of doubt it for a second, like, is this thing OK? And then around the three, three-and-a-half month mark is when I think my body finally accepted all the trauma.”

As Story began to work his way back, he found help from two former Red Sox players, neither of whom overlapped with him in Boston.

“I was like, no chance, like he’s not gonna play,” manager Alex Cora said on Saturday afternoon, after the Red Sox activated Story from the 60-day injured list and put him in the starting lineup. “He turned a corner, I don’t even know when, and then he started sending me videos of Kyle (Schwarber) with the Cubs.”

In 2021, Schwarber was the trade deadline acquisition who helped Boston go on an unexpectedly deep playoff run. But on April 7, 2016, he’d suffered full tears of the ACL and LCL in his left knee. The next day, his season was declared to be over.

Just over six months later, Schwarber was in the lineup for Game 1 of the World Series. He played in five of the seven games, and his seven hits helped the Cubs win their first championship in 108 years.

“You try to find inspiration or something to point at and be like, someone’s done this before,” Story said. “Schwarber was like a similar situation. We got hurt around the same time, obviously different injuries, but he came back in the World Series as everyone knows, and played a big part. I saw that and I was like, man, this is something to shoot for, and here we are.”

“That’s where my mind was set, and yeah, I think it helped.”

Schwarber was on the vision board, but Story didn’t reach out to him. He did, however, speak to former Rockies teammate Kevin Pillar. Ironically, they only played together in 2020 because the Red Sox traded Pillar to Colorado.

“Kevin was a big help,” Story said. “Not many people have had this exact injury and he’s one of them, so I leaned on him heavily.”

Among what Story described as “nuances of the recovery,” Pillar understood the inability to sleep. Just knowing that someone else had been through it and come out the other side was huge.

“It’s just nice to have someone that’s been through it, to have in your corner,” Story said.

Current teammates were in his corner, too. Before he left to rehab in California, they could see that he was suffering, beyond the injury itself and inability to be on the field with them.

“They were concerned. They saw me and I just wasn’t myself,” he said. “Not sleeping, not resting. Just felt like my body was redlining, and they helped me a lot. They supported me big-time. Always reaching out. Jarren (Duran), always reaching out, and (Rob Refsnyder). Every time they reached out, I felt a lot of love.”

Story missed 133 games. The recovery has been faster than the elbow surgery in January 2023, which kept him on the sidelines until early August last season, or any other ailment Story has ever overcome. Don’t mistake that for an easy road back.

“I never thought it was gonna be that hard,” Story said. “It was like, 10 times harder than the elbow.”

On Saturday night, Story stepped up to bat at Fenway for the first time this season. The campaign will be over soon enough. But for the shortstop, it’s just good to be back.