Progress

It's three and a half weeks post surgery and I'm actually typing this with two hands. I'm not supposed to be out of the sling, but I need to exercise my wrist and forearm a little bit. My elbow is still tightly tucked to my body. I'm noticing small improvements in things which is a promising sign since for a while I felt like I was going backwards. As the swelling subsided so did the muscle mass so there seemed to be an abnormal amount of movement in the joint. Now the only real concern revolves around sneezing.

For the first few weeks, washing my arm pit was a challenge. When I would lean to the side the create a gap between by arm and my body, standing back upright caused a lot of pain and catching in the shoulder. That has calmed down a bit. Here is a tip that I have discovered. With the arm contained against the body all day, it's no surprise that it will get sweaty. Deodorant does the job containing body odor but I like to feel nice and dry. I like to put baby powder under my arm from arm pit to elbow. The challenging part though is sprinkling the powder down and hitting the correct spot. I discovered that if I shake the powder container in the upright position and squeeze it hard, I can shoot the powder up to wear I need it to go.

I'm supposed to be doing my range of motion exercises five times a day. That has been a real challenge since the normal breaks in my day are morning before work, when I get home and before I go to bed. I'm averaging three to four times per day. The external rotation exercise is painful but bearable. It's more a tightness than anything. Having to raise my arm though is a different story. I lie on my back and grab my left wrist with my right hand and raise my arm straight out. I then lift it up to an angle about ten degrees higher than straight up and hold for five seconds. I do that ten times. The painful part is returning the arm down to my body. For some reason that is bar far the most painful thing I do. I have figured out how to lesson it by relaxing my shoulder muscles as much as possible. Even when I think I'm relaxed, I find I can go further releasing a hidden tense muscle.

I have another three weeks to go in the sling and it won't come a moment too soon. Sometimes I feel protected by it and others I feel like a prisoner. My sister bought me one of the fake sheep seat belt liners. I hate them on a seat belt in the car, but it has been a life saver on the strap of the sling. The Velcro was eating my right shoulder.

I discovered a numb spot today about the size of a half dollar on my upper arm. It seems to be just below where the bicep tendon attaches to the shoulder just to the left of my arm pit. Being New Years Eve I will have to wait until Monday to call the doctor and see if this is anything I should be concerned about.

Bite Me

Several people mentioned to me today that they think I'm talking about my shoulder too much or they think doing a blog on it is "gay". All I have to say to them is "Bite Me!" When you have something happen to you that's so life transforming, that changes the way you function by the minute, it consumes everything you do. When you can try it for one day where you can't dress yourself, drive yourself anywhere or sleep, then you'll have a right to saying something. Now do it for six weeks and tell me your life is normal.

You are not under any obligation to read these and if you don't like it showing up on Facebook feel free to defriend me. I'm writing this for a few reasons. The first and most important is that it gives me an outlet to express my frustration of being temporarily disabled. I can only imagine what it would be like to have a permanent disability. Doing this is also a creative outlet for me. I like to write and this just gives me a lot to write about. I'm also doing it for the benefit of those about to go through this. I went in blind and wished I had more people to talk to about what it would be like.

It never fails, while driving down the road and some moron driver cuts me off or is driving three miles per hour, I have to refrain from flipping them off because inevitably it will be my client who is walking up the studio stairs behind me that was behind the wheel. It's happened several times. As a business owner and a hockey coach, I'm supposed to be a role model so I have to bite my tongue when I really have a lot to say and a creative way to say it. So when I say "Bite Me", I'm being polite, read between the lines.

One Day At A Time

I'm almost two weeks post surgery and I'm already getting antsy to get out of the sling. I have at least another 5 weeks to go in it. It definitely does offer me a degree of comfort and protection though. I feel vulnerable without it, but at the same time smothered by it. Last night while I was laying on the couch drifting off to sleep, I kept wanting to roll on my left side and put my hand under the pillow. My mind forgot that I couldn't so the sling did it's job in not allowing me to.

On the brighter side, I'm getting pretty good at typing with one hand. On the other hand, my Photoshop dexterity has been cramped since so much of it is a two handed operation. The thing I miss most right now though is driving my car. It's a six speed manual transmission so until I can grasp the wheel with my left hand it's staying put. I can shift and then grab the wheel again, but with winter conditions approaching and my car's high amount of torque steer under acceleration I'm better off letting my wife drive me around like Miss Daisy.

I passed my first reaction test the other day. While opening the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, my deodorant and several other objects came tumbling out at me. Normally I would be flailing my arms in every direction, snagging things out of the air like a praying mantis. Instead, I let the things fall to the ground, pieces bouncing and flying everywhere. I smirked at my success of having passed the test. Then one more thing fell out as if mocking my success and wouldn't you know it, I flinched sending a shockwave through my shoulder. "How rude!", I thought.

I went to the ice rink today to watch my daughter's hockey game vs Skaneateles. I never realized how many people greet me by grabbing my left shoulder. I also had to take evasive action to avoid being run over by a pack of little hockey players making a mad dash to the snack counter for their post game Slushies. It's a dangerous world out there I tell ya.

To Flinch or Not To Flinch

To flinch, or not to flinch, that is the question. As the nerve block wore off, I knew I would be needing a little help with the pain that was settling in. When I left the hospital, I was given a generous supply of Hydrocodone. I'm not a big fan of the dopey feeling that it causes, but I'm also not a big fan of pain. Besides, I could use a little help sleeping that second night. I snuggled comfortably on the couch, nestled between blankets and pillows to give me just the right amount of support. As the pills kicked in I began feeling nice and light as my eyes got heavy. My body was getting to that perfect state of relaxation where you almost feel like your floating when WHAM!, I was hit by a massive flinch that sent me through the roof in pain. I've flinched before as I'm falling asleep and have even done the head bob as a passenger on a long road trip, but this one was brutal. In fact, I think the epicenter was right in my left shoulder. I was sure I just yanked some stitches out.

After a few minutes my heart rate settled down and I began to allow myself to drift back in to that blissful state of relaxation. WHAM! It happened again! Seriously? Is my body trying to kill itself? What the WTF is going on?

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Three more times that night I was jolted awake like I was struck by lightning. The next morning I was exhausted and sore to say the least. After the allotted six hours, I took two more pills. Those started to kick in around noon. While watching TV, I began to doze again. I don't know if it was the pills, my exhaustion or the fact that daytime TV sucks. All I knew was that I needed to get some sleep. WHAM! It happened again. By this time I was wide awake, scared to close my eyes.

I was up until about 2 a.m. when I decided to give it another try at sleep. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! I wanted to scream. I honestly started whining out of delirium. I finally fell asleep around 3:30 only to wake up at 6:20 to the sound of my nine-year-old son puking in the upstairs bathroom.

I fell back asleep at 8:30, not for lack of flinching, but at that point I was so tired, I was back asleep ten seconds after the flinch.

The next few days were a blur of small doses of sleep, lots of medication and way too much tossing and turning. I did some research online as to whether or not Hydrocodone causes flinching and I never did find a clear answer, although the list of other side effects was longer than Santa's naughty list. I decided to ween myself off of the pills, at first splitting the dose with one Tylenol and eventually switching over to just Tylenol. The flinching is still there although the intensity has subsided.

Now the real question is why am I wide awake at 3:20 a.m. to be typing this. Last night I took two Tylenol P.M., which knocked me out way more than the Hydrocodone, but it also made me very irritable. I woke up fighting with the blankets because I couldn't get them to go where I wanted with one arm. I didn't like the irritability so I didn't take anything tonight, and here I am.

D-Day

So there I was, lying on a hospital bed, 11 months after injuring my shoulder, waiting to have it fixed. I had completed my pre-op appointments a month earlier, so I knew what I was in for, but that didn't help to calm the nerves. There wasn't anything specific I was dreading, just the whole process. I knew it would hurt, I could handle that. I knew I would be in a sling for 6-8 weeks taking it one day at a time. I knew I had six months of rehab in front of me, a tedious but doable task. So why was I so nervous? I think it was just the thought of someone fishing around in my shoulder with foreign objects that don't belong there, and worse, leaving some of the parts behind. What if one of the anchors came loss? Would it come out in my stool or get wedged between a joint and jam it up? I can't help but imagine the anchors looking like drywall mollies. They never seemed all that reliable to me.

One by one different specialists and nurses would come in to see me, describing in detail what their role was. Each one would begin asking me my name and birth date. Dr. Miller even came in to double check which shoulder we were doing and marked it with a purple marker. I wonder who got the wrong shoulder done to warrant such diligent double checking, or worse, who had their perfectly good spleen removed when they went in for shoulder surgery. One of the nurses inserted on IV port in to my left hand, which looking back now was the most painful part of the experience. After that, all the drugs were just inserted in to the port. The first round was dose of Benadryl followed by an anti nausea medicine. I wasn't nauseous to begin with but I didn't mind the extra protection. The Benadryl made my arm hurt though. I could feel it creeping up toward my elbow. I very quickly felt like I was floating and the room became surreal.

After a few minutes, a group of people came in to administer the nerve block in my neck to numb my arm. Just before they did that, they put another dose of something in the port and that's the last I remember. According to my wife Sue I was still awake answering questions they were asking me about there placement of the nerve block, but I don't remember any of it.

The next thing I remember was shaking violently with my legs because I was freezing. I think I had six or seven hospital blankets on me. They were very comfortable, like they just took them out of the microwave. I woke up again to my teeth chattering. I think I was sipping apple juice too. The doctor came in to talk to me and tell me how it went, but it went in one ear and out the other. I finally felt stable enough to hobble across the hallway to go pee. It was like being at a restaurant when they clear your unfinished plate when you went to the bathroom. As soon as I was done, there was a wheel chair waiting for me to throw me out the door. I don't even remember getting dressed. I'm sure I did at some point because before I knew it, I was in the car on the way home. Time seemed very compressed. I don't think it was back to normal until I was home for a few hours.

With the nerve block in full effect, I couldn't feel a thing from the left side of my neck down to my finger tips. It was like someone else's arm was attached to my body. I kept reminding myself to be careful cracking my knuckles so I wouldn't inadvertently snap a finger off. I could just imagine picking up a lifeless finger from the floor saying, "Oops, my bad."

I always remember a story my mom would tell from when she was young about waking up in the middle of the night after sleeping on her arm. She had no feeling in it and didn't realize it was her own arm. She thought someone was grabbing her. She got up screaming and ran down the stairs trying to escape the grasp this arm had on her.

I didn't realize how much the nerve block was helping until it began to fade around midnight and I realized my shoulder was still mine and it wasn't happy. I woke up the next morning after spending the night on the recliner to some remnant numbness in my thumb. It was the last good nights sleep I would have for a while.

The Long Wait

After returning from Florida a week after dislocating my left shoulder, I decided to hold off going to the orthopedist to see if it would heal on its own. Injuring my shoulder in January was both a blessing and a curse. As a professional photographer, winter is my slower time of year so I had the luxury of healing without jeopardizing any big jobs. The down side was that my shoulder was extremely unstable so shivering in the cold was downright dangerous. When I would start to shiver the top of my humorous would shake in the shoulder socket. With each shake it would pick up speed like an out of control snow ball barreling down a hill. Within seconds the tremor was so violent that the shoulder was shaking out of the joint. It was quite painful to say the least.

Several months passed and it was evident that the injury was not healing as nicely as I would have liked. Some stability was returning and the pain was decreasing, however there were a few positions that would catch something causing me to shriek like a little girl. It was time for an MRI. I would not normally consider myself claustrophobic, but I had an MRI a year earlier for headaches that suddenly appeared and it was a horrific experience. It wasn't the tube that freaked me out, but the cage they screwed over my face, locking me in the capsule of death. After a brief spike in heart rate and hyperventilating, I was able to calm myself down. Would my shoulder MRI be the same? I got myself pretty worked up ahead of time, nevertheless the process went off without a hitch. In fact, I even enjoyed an afternoon siesta while in the tube. I shouldn't say it went perfectly though. They had to redo one of the scans because the slightest movement, including my breathing, blurred one of the images.

My left shoulder is the subject of this blog, however it's my right shoulder that's the bad one. I've been dislocating my right shoulder ever since I threw a dodge ball in gym class in tenth grade and my shoulder made it to the opposing team before the ball. The big dislocation came during tryouts for the hockey team at SUNY Brockport my Freshman year. I went to college for meteorology and hockey and didn't end up doing either.

I figured as long as I was doing the MRI on my left shoulder, I should just have them do both. A few weeks later I went back to the ortho for the results and wouldn't you know it, both shoulders had extensive tears.

By this time wedding season was just getting under way, so it just wasn't financially feasible to have surgery until December. The waiting game began. All I had to do was avoid having drunk wedding guests bash in to me on the dance floor like it was a mosh pit. Easier said than done.

The Journey Begins

I've recently embarked on a journey of which I would have been totally content living without. The road I am on hopefully leads to a pain free life as I travel through the healing process after having shoulder surgery less than a week ago. There is a ton of information online regarding the surgery itself, but not a lot on people's individual experience with the healing process.

My journey began January 9th, 2011 while playing goal in my weekly Sunday night hockey game. I've been playing ice hockey since 1983, long enough to know what I'm doing and long enough to know my body doesn't heal like it used to. For a few years I had been debating on when to hang up the pads, or at least stop playing at the level I was at. Our group consisted of talented young guns fresh out of successful college hockey careers as well as a bunch of has beens who can still hold their own on the ice. At 40 years old, I fell in to the latter half with my glory days behind me.

What started out as a normal Sunday night, struggling to get the motivation to get off the couch and go out in the cold, quickly took a turn for the worse. There was a flurry of players crashing the net around me, and to be honest, I don't fully remember what happened other than the instant I knew my life had just taken a 90 degree turn. I made a butterfly save leaving the rebound off to my left side. I quickly dropped down to my left elbow to smother the puck and when my elbow hit the ice I heard an abnormally loud crunch next to my left ear. There was no mistaking what happened. My shoulder came completely out of the socket moving forward toward my left collar bone. As I type this reliving the moment, the same wave of nausea is creeping back like it had that night. One second all that matters is stopping a 3oz piece of rubber from crossing a painted line, and the next nothing else mattered more than getting my shoulder back where it belonged. I threw off my blocker and mask to grab my left arm. I could feel the color draining out of me like water spiraling down the drain. My hands trembled as I tried to figure out how I was going to put my shoulder back where it belonged. The only thing I knew for sure is that I wasn't moving until it was back.

A few players came to my aid and after careful consideration of what to do with me, one of them suggested I try doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider up my chest. I tried to no avail. I had no strength in my left arm at all. The pain was unbearable. I had to move it. I grabbed my left thumb with my right hand and gently lifted it up my chest, moving my shoulder ever so slightly back in the right direction. That's all I needed to feel to give it one good pull. With the grossest, most satisfying suction noise, my shoulder slid back in to place. It was excruciating and bliss at the same time.

After a slow process getting off the ice and removing my equipment, I drove home to tell my wife that I broke. With a family full of hockey players, including three goalies, we're used to our share of bumps and bruises. This one however was life altering. A trip to the ER revealed no broken bones, so I was put in a sling and sent on my way with instructions to see the orthopedist. Unfortunately, I had other plans and boarded a plane the next morning for Florida to attend my Grandfather's funeral.