I have been blessed with good health and hardly ever get ill. Now that I am an old man, some things don’t work quite as good as they used to, but I really don’t have anything to complain about. I don’t have any of the chronic conditions that many of my contemporaries have. So, It I find a little something wrong, I have to make a big deal out of it.
On Valentine’s Day, I wrote a post about compensating. The upshot was that I injured my shoulder by falling from a ladder last Father’s Day, but learned to live with it by compensating, i.e., finding different ways to do things to avoid the pain. I got by pretty well for about seven months, though I was feeling significant pain when sleeping and playing guitar.
At my regular checkup, my doctor recommended physical therapy. Yet, after nine sessions there was no lasting improvement. My therapist recommended seeing an orthopedist. After x-rays and an exam, the good doctor believed I had a torn rotator cuff. The recovery period for that surgery is four to six months. All my hobbies and pursuits (and most of life’s activities) require the use of my right arm. So, I was filled with a bit of dread at that point.
The next step was an MRI. The results indicated two small tears and a lot of inflammation and various itises. No surgery was required, but a cortisone shot followed by PT (again) was the recommended treatment. I was so thankful; I almost threw a party.
I told a friend about my injury and needed injection and she confided she had the same injury and got the cortisone injection. (We old people love comparing stories about our ailments.) In vivid detail, she described how unbelievable excruciating it was to get the shot. She was beside herself in pain and drew back with her good arm and hit the doctor as hard as she could. She said he was surprised.
I was really dreading the injection and have no idea why my experience was so different, but the pain from the shot was so slight and brief, I asked the Physician’s Assistant if she was sure she was done.
The injection knocked the pain way down and I am back at PT to regain all my range of motion and re-learn how to use my shoulder properly after eighth months of compensating. It feels fine, almost a hundred percent.
I am ecstatic about all of this and am getting a lot of mileage out it, having written about it twice now. Plus, I didn’t want to write about anything serious today.
