five more weeks
by alex
In this shot, the surgeon is looking for the labrum. It’s supposed to be where the needle is. Whoops.
For the visual thinkers, imagine the labrum as a soft, rubbery rim running around the circumference of the socket in your shoulder’s ball and socket joint. The shoulder socket is very very shallow, which is how we get such crazy range of motion in it, and the labrum makes it into a deeper cup.
It’s supposed to be attached on the inside circumference of the rim. Mine was attached to the outside circumference. This means that the socket was shallower than it was supposed to be (because the labrum didn’t cup the humerus (the ball part of your upper arm bone) enough). For people that know how loose my shoulder was, that was one reason why.
The other reason my shoulder was so loose is because I had both a Hill-Sachs lesion Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith divx and a Bankart lesion.
The Hill-Sachs is basically a dent in the humerus. It’s where the bone has been worn away from repeated dislocations. As the ball comes out of the socket, it rubbed away at the other bones in the joint.
I have quite a bit of bone loss on the other bone involved too. The normal shoulder joint is supposed to look like a pear (if you’re looking at it straight on, or looking at me in profile). Mine was worn out from all the dislocations and looks like an inverted pear. That’s quite a bit of bone loss. The doc didn’t say if I’ll get it back, and I don’t think I will.
Here, the labrum has been reattached. The white semicircle on top is bone, my humerus. The soft looking white stuff on the bottom is the reattached labrum. Yay!
Doc had to basically cut the labrum off the outside circumference of the socket and reattach it with sutures back in the inside. This is more severe than normal, and so instead of being in a sling for 4 weeks, I get a total of 6 weeks. Lovely.
Wikipedia has a nice picture of the shoulder joint. The Glenoid lig. is the labrum. Here is another good shoulder picture from a different aspect that might help you visualize it.
I don’t have much (if any) achey residual surgery pains. Now, it’s either a sharp sort of hurty, when I sneeze for example, or just the annoyance of wearing the sling.
The physician’s assistant gave me some different PT exercises to do, which I’m gladly complying with.
And in other news, my jawesome friend Brett traded cars with me, as he drives an automatic. So I’m semi-mobile.
Five more weeks. I can do it.
Comments
Why was the labrum originally attached to the outside circumference?
It reattached itself to the outside after healing improperly from the first surgery/repeated re-injuries.