Victory is Ours

I was always terrible at writing sports articles, but I'm pretty psyched at the moment, so I'm going to write it anyways. Tonight, I played in my first official USTA tennis match -- and we won 6-3, 6-1.  Sweet! My partner Smitha and I were the #3 doubles team, but our court was right by the table with the snacks, so we had a nice audience cheering us on.

To use a baseball phrase, we were "down quickly 0-2" in the first set, thanks to me being nervous and hitting all sorts of easy groundstrokes long. I'm not really sure why I was nervous given that, you know, there is really nothing at stake here, but it took until the third game for me to start hitting well. But I think it paid off to keep playing aggressive. Favorite shot of the night: I caught the net man cheating to the middle and smacked a backhand winner straight down the line. [Insert fist pump here.]

My shoulder was pretty achy and serving was especially a struggle, but I managed to escape with only being broken once (two double faults, so really, I gave it to them). Now that I've taken some Aleeve, I think the shoulder's fine again.

The team as a whole won every match except one, so it was a victorious night for the Sunnyvale Tennis Club women's 3.0 team.

Now I'm watching Sports Center and wondering:

• Wow, how did Papi hit a *triple*?
• Did the Nationals rip their logo from Walgreens?

Final Shoulder Update

It's been exactly a year and a day since my Bankart repair surgery, so I thought I should write one more update about the experience.

Last week, I had my final physical therapy session with Brianne. Passively (that is, lying on my back with Brianne rotating my shoulder), I have a full 90 degrees of external rotation now. Compared with a couple months ago, the motion is really smooth and easy now, with only very slight stretchiness at the end range. Actively (that is, rotating my shoulder on my own strength), I still have some work to do. I'm not quite strong enough to get to 90 degrees, so Brianne said I should continue to do internal and external exercises with the therabands.

I also have "full range" of motion raising my arm overhead and reaching up behind my back.  The "full range" is less than I can do with my left shoulder, but Brianne tells me that my left shoulder hyperextends, and that the range I'm now achieving with my right shoulder is what normal people should be able to do.

As I wrote in previous posts, I'm back to playing tennis now, although I'm not hitting many serves yet. Groundstrokes and volleys feel good, although one-handed backhand volleys are very weak still. Most of all, I'm encouraged that my arm really feels back to normal now, except for needing to build a little more strength, which I'm sure will happen over time.

Now that I've been through it all, here's my most important tip for anyone who's doing rehab for a Bankart repair surgery:

Good posture is important when doing exercises. Everyone wants to get to their range-of-motion goal as quickly as possible, and the body is very good at finding ways to "cheat" so it seems like you're getting the range. Try to start in a relaxed natural position, and be careful that all the motion is coming from rotating your rotator cuff. Nothing else should move (e.g. your shoulder blade or back). Basically, your whole body should stay very quiet. Learning to "embrace the pain" instead of avoiding the pain (e.g. using other muscles to compensate) is key to doing the exercises correctly.

The other important point, obviously, is to do the exercises regularly, which I was never very good at!

Fourth of July Celebrations!

Well outwardly, we didn't do much to celebrate the 4th of July this year. No fireworks or barbecue party -- we just sat around, lazily watching the Wimbledon semifinals (hooray for Federer and Nadal), and the Red Sox (who beat the Yankees again, sweet!). But we do have a couple reasons to be super-happy this Independence Day:

• We're officially in contract for our first home! Last week, after a mere three weeks "in the market", we made an offer for a lovely condo in Palo Alto. The sellers formally accepted yesterday, and on Monday, we get to write down a large number on a check and send in our downpayment! More fun details about the search and what the place is like later (still keeping fingers crossed until everything is actually finalized and we get the keys, haha).

• Today I also made my triumphant (okay, actually pretty lame) return to the tennis courts! Last week, I asked my physical therapist when I could play again (not serving or hitting big shots, just easy volleying) and she said I could actually play any time I wanted, but warned me that it would hurt a lot and I would be really weak if I insisted on starting so soon. In retrospect, this was probaby code for "no." But anyways, she was right. Several shots were really jarring and I could barely return one-handed backands. But WOW it was satisfying to be running around and playing a real sport again; I hate the treadmill and stationary bike so much at this point! In the end, I only managed to hit for about 20 minutes, but what a morale boost to work harder on my physical therapy.

Off to do more exercises and start packing!

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!

Bankart Repair

As many of you know, I have been periodically dislocating my right shoulder since I was 12. It's popped out of the socket probably a half dozen times, and it almost always happens on a tennis court when I try to serve.

Last summer, Chris and I started taking private tennis lessons with super-awesome Coach Rick at the Sunnyvale Tennis Center, and we were having a great time, making great progress especially on ground strokes and volleys. But at some point, we had to start working on serves, and unfortunately, I dislocated it again. Poo. Now, this is the most painful thing I've ever experienced, and it took a long time to slide back in this time. In fact, we'd given up and were on our way to the ER when we drove over a big speed bump that jarred it gruesomely back into place.

So I did some research and found that there's an 80% chance that I would re-dislocate it, even with physical therapy and strengthening exercises. This, of course, sounds totally believable considering my history. I eventually got an MRI, which showed that there was a tear in the labrum, making it much easier for the arm to slip out of the socket. My doctor, Dr. Theodore Bucklin, was nice enough to let me have a CD of the MRI images, and hopefully I can share those at some point. He recommended arthroscopic surgery to repair it. It's called a Bankart repair.

Well, today is the 10th day since I had the surgery, and I'm happy to say that things seem to be going well! I took the sling off, just one day after the surgery, and I could bend my arm at the elbow and let the arm "dangle" limply from the socket. (Yeah, incredible feat of athleticism, go Jenn. Woohoo.)

On Thursday, I started physical therapy, and I got a bunch more exercises to do. There's the "pendulum" where I do more aggressive dangling -- this one's easy. Then there's the one where I use my good arm to lift the bad arm to 90 degrees, straight in front of me, parallel to the ground if I'm standing. That one's pretty easy too, although it gets painful if I haven't taken enough painkillers and there's a lot of swelling.

The REAL bitch is the "external rotation" exercise. Think of the sort of rotation that happens when you're arm wrestling and you're losing. Now, that's uncomfortable even in normal circumstances, but my goal is to make it to a piddly 30 degrees in the next six weeks. (That's 30 degrees from *vertical*, btw.) Sadly, even if I push really hard, I can only make it to 10 degrees, on a *good* day. I guess this is not terrible progress considering how I couldn't even get *vertical* on the first day of therapy. But I have such a long way to go...sigh.

On the brighter side, as a birthday present, I realized I could type with both hands again!! I'm pretty excited about this. One-handed typing is sooooo awful. But Chris is being super nice and helpful. He makes all sorts of yummy food and I'm apparently off the hook for all the chores (yesss!). (Thaaaaank you Chris!)

Hopefully I can just stay motivated enough to keep up with these exercises. I'm watching the Australian Open raptly as an extra reminder of how good it's gonna be when I get my arm back.

Well. Okay. Not that good. But a little closer. :-)

Next milestone: Sutures come out on Thursday!