The world on our shoulders

This page will be about shoulders pure and simple (or maybe not so simple?)

Why?

Day 0

All within a sunny spring afternoon I recently broke my shoulder in that most dangerous activity of all – gardening – distracted and trying to move out of a garden bed, I lost my balance and fell off a retaining wall of 1.5 m. That realisation that you might fall and the preserving feeling that ‘all will be well’ as you do just that.

I winded myself, broke my shoulder, cracked a vertebrae wing and concussed my brain.  I seriously thought I had lost my left arm and turned to see it feeling quite disconnected to the rest of my body.

The pain was intense and worsening.  While waiting for ambos I was on the point of either passing out, panicking about a spinal injury; or threatening to get up and walking to the A&E.

Luckily I survived with the attention of loved ones, ambos and firies who got me off my back from the back garden, onto a trolley and into an ambulance on the way to a decent sized hospital. The big drugs helped me stay disconnected to all that activity but not the pain and fear of moving my arm.

Graphic warning – the shoulder in its fractured state

My interest in shoulders and healing was amplified from there.

I had never before broken a bone in my body. Bruised many and ripped a few ligaments with various activities.

I had managed to recover from frozen shoulders on both sides.

I had been in an ambulance before so a lot of memories resurfaced again.

As I woke from my surgery, I realised I was a ‘patient’ and I am not very good at that. As I tried to navigate moving in bed, I remembered treating people as a physio usually women with similar fractures and was awash with belated empathy for them (and therapist guilt).

and so …

the story begins on how I (and many others) manage and recover with a shoulder injury.