I know I haven't posted in a while. I will make sure I post every few days. The topic for tonights post is my shoulder.
When I first got injured I didn't realize how bad my shoulder really was. I know that I had broken my clavicle and scapula but thought that was the only problem. I was in the hospital, not really moving my arm, just knowing that even without any other problems I was going to have a hard time getting my shoulder back to action. I didn't even think about how much ore work rehab on my back would be because of the lack of strength on one side. Then I find out that I have nerve damage in my shoulder as well. The means that it is going to take even longer to get back to everything.
I have battled hard to get my shoulder back to the point where I can use my arm as normal, for the most part. When I was still in the hospital I did a test called an EMG. Basically what the test is is they use little needles to test your muscles and measure the nurse activity in the muscle. Its a very painful test and I don't like them. Well, about a month ago I did another one to check and see if I had any nerve regeneration or growth and it turns out I did. Let me go back for a minutes and say that there was a time when my doctors were talking about doing a nerve transplant on my shoulder to get everything working again. After my second EMG they said that I was having good return so I didn't pursue the nerve transplant.
It has been about two months since my EMG and I have been thinking a lot about my shoulder and how it is heeling. I think that I am going to look into getting the nerve transplant in order to get my shoulder completely back. Right now I still have a lot of atrophy around my scapula where the nerves were damaged the worst. I want to fix that so not only can I regain the muscle and use my shoulder like it is supposed to be used, but also to get the normal feeling back in my lower arm. I go and see the Ortho at the navy hospital on Thursday and I am going to see if I can get that taken care of.
There is a lot of hoops that need to be jumped through to get the navy to okay this surgery so it might end up waiting until I am medically retired and get it done then. The sooner the better though so I will keep you updated on what happens!
When I first got injured I didn't realize how bad my shoulder really was. I know that I had broken my clavicle and scapula but thought that was the only problem. I was in the hospital, not really moving my arm, just knowing that even without any other problems I was going to have a hard time getting my shoulder back to action. I didn't even think about how much ore work rehab on my back would be because of the lack of strength on one side. Then I find out that I have nerve damage in my shoulder as well. The means that it is going to take even longer to get back to everything.
I have battled hard to get my shoulder back to the point where I can use my arm as normal, for the most part. When I was still in the hospital I did a test called an EMG. Basically what the test is is they use little needles to test your muscles and measure the nurse activity in the muscle. Its a very painful test and I don't like them. Well, about a month ago I did another one to check and see if I had any nerve regeneration or growth and it turns out I did. Let me go back for a minutes and say that there was a time when my doctors were talking about doing a nerve transplant on my shoulder to get everything working again. After my second EMG they said that I was having good return so I didn't pursue the nerve transplant.
It has been about two months since my EMG and I have been thinking a lot about my shoulder and how it is heeling. I think that I am going to look into getting the nerve transplant in order to get my shoulder completely back. Right now I still have a lot of atrophy around my scapula where the nerves were damaged the worst. I want to fix that so not only can I regain the muscle and use my shoulder like it is supposed to be used, but also to get the normal feeling back in my lower arm. I go and see the Ortho at the navy hospital on Thursday and I am going to see if I can get that taken care of.
There is a lot of hoops that need to be jumped through to get the navy to okay this surgery so it might end up waiting until I am medically retired and get it done then. The sooner the better though so I will keep you updated on what happens!
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