9 October, 2006 I had surgery on my left shoulder; I’d been gritting my teeth through pain, joint instability, occasional numbness, & as many physical therapy sessions that my insurance would authorize… I finally come to the point of being willing to go through the surgical procedure with the hope that ‘on the other side’, something in the shoulder would be better than it was…

Post-surgery, I heard good news – the torn rotator cuff ID’d on the MRI had not needed a complete repair, but rather was able to be ‘fixed’ with some clean-up (which is surgical talk for we cut away anything that looked like it was shredded.) Another highlight of the procedure was that the top of my collar bone & the bone that anchored the joint was somehow compressing the joint, pinching various shoulder parts of scoey when he moved it, meaning pain & numbness. The solution was to shave the bone using something like a power-sander… the good Dokter said this would be the cause of the majority of my post-surgery pain, but that it would most likely clear up & heal in 8 weeks or so, esp. with another round of therapy.

Gritted my teeth. Did the therapy. Went to the gym to therap-ize on my own. Broke down some scar tissue doing some cool exercise called flys. I’m keeping on it.

Talked to a couple of guys about rebuilding a shoulder, post-surgery. Both had the same advice – use it. Its going to hurt. If you do your exercises, strengthen it, & keep on, it will probably rebound. But it might take a year to fully recover.

Then, oops.

Tuesday, 5 June, I was playing softball for my last-place team in the Sparks D- Rec League… swung the bat, hit the ball real hard, & my shoulder popped out of joint. Hurt so bad I fell down. On the ground, just out of the batters box.

Fortuneately, Aric with an A is a Chi-Rho-Practor & knows how to deal with the sin of shoulders… he helped me work El Guapo back into place. The nausea from dislocation went away after about 20 minutes. Shoulder hurts, muscles around it hurt. Wonder if I have done something naughty, something that has set back my recovery from last October….

Back to the gym today…