Last August I did something stupid in the gym and injured my shoulder. It seemed to be slowly getting better and I kept working and lifting weights. Then in November, my shoulder began getting more and more painful until I finally bit the bullet and saw a doctor (who forever endeared himself to me by saying he was baffled by the chart of a 51 year old woman being on the door to my exam room since the patient in the room (me) clearly couldn’t have been that old) Next up was an MRI which showed a complete rotator cuff tear and assorted damage.
I didn’t have a choice if I wanted to regain normal motion and strength – I had to have surgery to attempt to reattach the tendon to the bone, though the doctor kept pessimistically warning me that things might not be repairable. So yesterday was the day (this all happened fast because the muscles were atrophying) and – hurray! – it’s now successfully repaired. I was totally drugged up when the doctor talked to me but remember him saying that it was an unusual tear but that it’s fixed. I’ll get all the details when I see him on Monday.
Now comes the hard part – six months of rehab to get ‘reasonable use’ back. Right now my shoulder has a bandage about the size and thickness of a football pad and my right arm is in what they call a sling and what I call an upper body chastity belt. It’s all thick padding and Velcro straps, with a waist band and padded wedge that holds my arm out from my body. I can’t do anything that will fire my shoulder muscles for at least six weeks and don’t have any use of my right hand at all (bet you guessed that I’m right handed). This, gang, is challenging.
So I may not be able to post much – this post is all left handed pecking – and it’s taken me a lo-o-o-ng time. Matter of fact, if it wasn’t for my three marvelous pain meds, I would have lost interest a long time ago!
But I’ll be reading here every day, as always, and participating as much as possible. It would be great if some of you would like to jump in and post some topics for discussion or just general chit chat. We have the best conversations here and I’m always amazed by how much we all have in common. If you’re usually a shy person, now would be a wonderful time to speak up about whatever’s on your mind.
Love you all --
but I'll certainly do what I can to help. In the meantime, you take care m'dear! I've had my share of rotator cuff problems (in fact, it seems like a number of us here in 3FC land have had rotator cuff problems; is it something in the water?) and the main curative seems to be time. The good news is that they've fixed it; the bad news is that you have to rest it. 
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