I hope you heal up quickly and get better soon, Joey P. I had frozen shoulder (both of them) about four years ago, and I know that shoulder pain is the pits.
Yeesh, your post about keeping them from giving you NSAIDs alarms me. My stomach is also touchy about ibuprofen or Aleve, though aspirin doesn’t bug it too much if I’ve had food.
And I’m reminded of a ghastly midnight trip I had to take to the ER after taking codeine. I’m convinced it had some sort of effect on my pancreas, because the symptoms were so perfectly in line with pancreatitis that I read about afterwards. No, ER nurses, I wasn’t having a bit of “stomach upset”; I thought I was dying of a heart attack or some other horrible thing.
We ought to get some of those medic alert bracelets specifying what not to give us. I wonder if boneheaded nurses ignore those too?
O.k. you had the surgery, so they got to know what the problem was but for the life of me I’m not seeing it in your update posts. A tear to the labrum?
I see I haven’t updated this in a long time, not since just a few days after the surgery.
First of all, it wasn’t a SLAP tear, it was a posterior Bankart lesion. Same idea, but the tear was at the back of my shoulder whereas with a SLAP, the tear is at the top.
I’m still in PT, twice a week. My therapist said I have the third tightest shoulder she’s ever worked on (in like 25 years) and my PA now has me in a JASsplit. For those of you that have had surgery that involved a CPM machine, this is like having it go all the way to one end and then parking it there for 45 minutes and maybe pushing it a few more degrees every 5 or 10 minutes if it’s not painful enough. It really sucks.
The PA said there is an option to go back in and break up the scar tissue but at this point it’s really not worth it since one of the big risks is that it just all re-forms and I end up right back here again.
I should be clear that my issue is mostly at the end range. If I’m working in front of me, below shoulder height, I’m OK. I tire quickly, but that’s it and it’s normal. However, I can’t throw a ball or a dart or skip a stone to save my life. My arm doesn’t go back that way anymore, the muscles to do that are too tight.
I, for the life of me, still don’t understand why suturing down some cartilage on the socket side of my shoulder joint makes my triceps so tight it’s almost unusable, even 6 months later. I’ve asked my PT and PA, but it just doesn’t make sense. Everything is ‘healed’ there’s no swelling, I just can’t wrap my head around why a muscle 6 inches away, down my arm (and some issues in my back) is still tight.
As soon as your off pain meds…as long as your comfortable driving one handed. I drove to work three days later because I was bored out of my skull at home.
If they give you a sling, wear it. Even if you don’t think you need it, it keeps people from bumping into you, patting you on the back/shoulder, trying to shake your hand etc. Basically it lets others know something’s wrong and they can’t grab at you. It’ll also remind YOU that something’s wrong so you don’t try to use that arm for something like grabbing at the steering wheel or a pencil rolling off a counter.
I woke up without my gown on and with my shoulder bandaged (duh) and the Iceman in place. That picture you see of me (with glasses on), was about 2 minutes after I came to. I still remember thinking ‘why does my shoulder hurt so much, oh yeah, I finally had that surgery’
A little while later they had me put on a T-shirt. I mean, they don’t want you leaving naked (all I had on was underwear. How they got me out of the gown, I don’t know. But more importantly they were teaching me how to get my sling on and off, get the iceman on and off and get a shirt on and off. None of which is all that hard, but it still helps to have someone that’s done it hundreds of times walk you through it the first time.
Oh, and before the surgery, get pants and shoes you can slip in and out of. I mean, I probably could have worked my belt just fine*, but it was a good excuse to live in Adidas track pants for a month. I had no idea how comfortable those were.
*You have to remember, it’s your shoulder that was operated on, not your elbow/wrist/hand. Two days later, after my first shower, I had no problem getting my contacts in and out with that hand. Okay, not ‘no problem’ but it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. No, putting on deodorant. It was at least two months before that didn’t hurt to do. But some of this is specific to a labrum repair. A customer at my store had a rotator cuff done at about that same time and got much better much faster and my PT said that’s normal. They won’t know for sure until they go in, but as of right now, they don’t think they have any tears to fix with you. My guess is that the majority of the pain you’re going to have to deal with, post-op, is a few weeks of swelling.
Well, it’s probably time for an update isn’t it.
We’re about one year post op.
My shoulder is still quite tight but the original pain from the injury is gone. They say from the day of the surgery to being 100%, for this surgery, is about a year. If it’s going get to 100%, I imagine I have about another year. My PT (if I didn’t say this before), did say a few times that I was one of the worst (tightest) shoulder cases she’s ever worked on in nearly 30 years. At my last appointment with my doc, he gave me one last cortisone shot and did say that my tear was pretty bad. Even though the MRI did made it look small, once they got in there, it was fairly large.
I’m long out of PT and I do use my right shoulder 98% as much as I did pre-injury. Partially because I can and that I have a high tolerance for that kind of pain but I’m also very aware that if I don’t it’s going to lock up on me.
What else?
I actually still see my PT from time to time, the office is across from where I work so she stops in for lunch once in a while and she always comments that I look like I’m back to normal. Of course, that’s under typical circumstances, I’m sure I couldn’t run out and play tennis without some extra therapy, even trying to throw a ball or play darts would require some stretching before hand. But as a physical therapist she notices things like that I swing my arms ‘normally’ or that my hands are turned the correct way when I walk or that I’m not favoring my left arm. WRT my hands, when I first met her (and her intern) one of the first things they both mentioned is that my right hand was turned in (think knuckle dragging) instead of with my palm facing my body.
I do keep meaning to check to see what the anchors are made out of. I’m 99% sure that they’re nylon, but I should double check. If I ever need another MRI for any reason, I’d like to know for sure. I think they’re Arthrex Pushlocks, but I’d have to check the surgery report to be sure.
Hmmm, Oh, I remember, workers comp, once the disability is done being paid out (a small but not insignificant percentage of the entire thing) will have footed close to $90k. I’m glad I claimed it that way. I told the boss I was happy to just toss it on my regular insurance since I had already hit my deductible so why raise our rates, but in the end, I would have paid a bunch of copays that year and hit my deductible last year and this year. Instead I never saw a single bill and got paid for it.
Anything else? Ask me anything. I’ll answer any questions anyone has. I kind of enjoy talking about it.
I was just searching for labrum tear and stumbled upon this forum. I’ve been having this extreme pain since July 2015 while playing volleyball or performing shoulder related exercises at the gym. Fast forward Nov 2015, it wasn’t getting better so I requested for an MRI arthogram for my left shoulder which showed a torn labrum.
I can’t do any lat pulldowns nor shoulder presses at the gym anymore and I stopped playing volleyball . Anything that involved overheard movement using my left shoulder is painful. Even tucking my shirt at the back using my left hand is a challenge. Ortho doc suggested I try the PT route first. I did that for 4 weeks last month and I think that it really helped a lot but I’m still experiencing pain and still cant sleep on my left side.
I’ve seen another ortho doc who again suggested another PT :smack:
I don’t want to do another PT and dont get me wrong it helped but it didn’t really fixed me.
I’m a very active guy and want to give back to playing sports and going to the gym and I feel like surgery would be my only option. I’m just trying to consider whether to do it now which means I’m out of action in summer or just do it in the Fall 2016 so I can rehab in winter. I was told it takes 4-6 months for the recovery.
This should really be it’s own thread and that’s not nearly enough information. Did you do something to it? Does it hurt when you move it? Is there pain anywhere else in your range of motion? Does it get tired easily? Have you lost strength? Is it tender? Can you sleep on it? Does ice help? Have you looked online for things like arthritis? Frozen Shoulder? Bursitis? Tendonitis? SLAP tear (which I’m guessing brought you to this thread)? Impingement? Separated Shoulder? Rotater Cuff issue.
There’s a lot of things that can happen with a shoulder.
How old are you? How active are you? Sports? Lifting anything (even just at work)?
Have you ruled anything out by checking out symptoms any deciding that one thing or the other can’t be it?
There’s got to be more to the story than ‘my shoulder hurts when I do this’.
