Shoulder Finally Improving

When my doctor first told me that I needed to have a Bankart repair, I was disappointed that I couldn't find more information about the rehab process on the internet. There were plenty of articles making different recommendations on how soon to remove various restrictions (i.e. when to stop using the sling, what angle of rotation to aim for at what week), but not much information about what sort of pain was acceptable, and what pitfalls to watch out for when you're doing the exercises. Granted, this is all stuff you should hear from a physical therapist instead of the internet, but it still would have been nice to read someone else's account for reassurance.

So after my shoulder surgery in January, I meant to write regular blog posts about how my physical therapy was going. But there were a number of reasons why I didn't do it:

• Recovering from surgery made me much more tired than I expected, to the point where it took significant willpower just to go to work and then head home to do more exercises.
• Progress was very slow (much slower than my physical therapist expected), so I was often too worried or frustrated to think about improving the internet.

Twelve weeks after surgery, I was supposed to have regained full range of motion. That means I should have been able to lift my arm to 180 degrees (like raising your hand in class), and have 90 degrees of external rotation. Instead, at twelve weeks, I was struggling to lift my arm to 90 degrees, and get even 30 degrees of external rotation. Even worse was that I had stopped making weekly progress.

My doctor chalked it up to everyone reacting differently to surgery and taking different amounts of time to recover. My physical therapist wondered whether lifting my restrictions earlier would have prevented so much scar tissue from building up. There was so much stiffness that it was really hard for me to do exercises correctly without subconsciously "cheating".

The body is amazing in how many ways it can "cheat" to reach a goal. Each week, my physical therapist found a new dimension that I was cheating on without knowing it. For instance, on the arm-lifting exercise, I was rotating my shoulder blade out and around my body in order to lift my arm, instead of letting my arm rotate in the socket (the goal of the exercise). I can't even do this consciously with my good shoulder. Likewise, on the external rotation exercise, I was tilting back my shoulder blade, which made it look like I had a good angle without getting any real rotation in the socket.

Today, after lots of hard work with my physical therapist to get me to do the exercises RIGHT, I'm happy to report that I can lift my arm to ~150 degrees, and I can do external rotation to almost 90 degrees. The big turning point was a month ago, when my doctor told me to start taking LOTS more ibuprofen (3 a day, 3 times a day, instead of 2 a day total, which is what I had been doing before), and when I finally ran out of ways to cheat on the exercises. Apparently, doing exercises correctly - swelling and pain = goodness. (Go figure.) I also pay much more attention to what hurts. If I'm doing exercises correctly, I feel a deep ache in the back of my shoulder. If there's pain on the top or the front of the shoulder, it means I'm using the wrong muscles or letting the shoulder blade slip or tilt.

Hopefully, the next time I report back, I'll be on the courts again! I can't play tennis yet (obviously) but I can now do awesome things like driving, brushing my hair, holding doors open, and washing dishes. And I'm actually not being sarcastic about this -- it actually is quite awesome to be a normal person again!