Shoulder Pain Update

I can’t remember what I’ve told you all about some things anymore. Blog for long enough, and everything blurs together. But whatever I’ve said before, I’ll recap briefly now. About five years ago, something happened in my right shoulder. I don’t know what. As I recall, it started when I was driving a stick shift car in Europe. I went to a physical therapist, who diagnosed me with impingement syndrome. Basically, doing a certain action repetitively had aggravated my shoulder, and I needed to calm it down or it would only get worse.

For several months, I went to appointments and did exercises, and the pain eventually went away. (Yay!) Then, back at the beginning of my kitchen renovation, I lifted a large piece of plywood, and something popped in the same shoulder. It hurt quite a lot. I hoped it would go away, but it didn’t, so I went back to physical therapy. I’ve been doing it since then. A bit less than a year, though I haven’t been able to do it consistently (which is why it’s taken so long to recover.) It took some time to figure out exactly what motions were aggravating the shoulder, and then when I went to strengthen those motions, that aggravated the other shoulder. It’s been quite an ordeal.

The good news is that I feel better now. I went and played volleyball the other night, and it hurt to use the shoulder, and I worried that I’d regress a ton due to that, but I was already feeling mostly better the next day. That’s significant progress.

The bad news is that to feel better, I have a laundry list of things I’m doing each day. Three different types of stretches, three different strength exercises. The goal is to build the shoulder up so that this doesn’t happen again, and I’m hopeful it works. But where ten years ago, I could just do whatever I wanted and then feel better in a day or two, I’m seeing now that my body doesn’t quite bounce back that way. If I want to feel okay, I need to be reasonable.

Getting old is a bummer, right? But at least it doesn’t have to be a painful bummer, if you watch what you do.

And a big shout out to the folks at Allied Physical Therapy, who have now shepherded me through both shoulder incidents, TMD, rehabbing my broken elbow, and helped with Daniela and MC on various injuries. If you’re looking for a place to go to get fantastic care and attention, from people who really know their stuff, you can’t do better than them.

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