Wake up call number 1

Long Post Warning - apologies in advance and get the Page Down key warmed up!

I've written in various places mentioning the long standing problem I have in my shoulder but never actually got round to saying exactly what happened with it ... Time to fix that :-)

In my 3rd year at uni, I was playing badminton with friends. I can be a bit of a nutter with badminton, I can usually see at least 3 possible shots and typically choose the most spectacular. This time, I went for a jump smash but missed it. While I was still in the air, instinct and reflexes made me go for an underarm recovery which I actually got to. By forcing my right arm through a path it was not supposed to follow.

Ouch !

I didn't think it was too bad at the time, kinda like only wrenching it a bit. However, it was still sore 3 weeks later when I next saw my mum so I asked her to take a peek at it. She took the arm through a series of movements (she's a nurse my mum) which just happened to reduce a very slight dislocation. I'd actually been walking around for 3 weeks with my shoulder out of its socket by about 1cm.

So how come I didn't get the sports centre to look at the injury ? Turns out the physio that was supposed to be on call wasn't and they had no medical cover in. A litigious person could get excited about the possibility for claiming off them but that's not me. Plus the "No Sense, No Feeling" part had taken over :-)

This happened at the start of summer, so guess who then played through most of a cricket season with a poorly shoulder ? Doh ! I've never been able to throw that far but with the dislocation I was able to throw in right from the boundary. That's like a 50% improvement. (I also gained 50 yards on my golf drive) Trouble is, I couldn't do much more than about 4 throws before the pain kicked in. This is where I left my original village team, keeping a player with a poorly shoulder on the boundary is vindictive. I'd had enough of driving 150 miles on a weekend to get to them from uni.

So I'd stopped playing cricket by the end of the summer but the problem was still there. My left arm was fine but if needing to pick up anything heavier than a shopping basket with my right, it felt like my arm was coming off. I saw the doctor at uni about it in the start of my fourth year and they diagnosed a Rotator Cuff Tear. (Nice page - good extra info there!)

I got given a physio session (ultrasound to heat up the muscles improving blood flow to fix it) and anti-inflammatory drugs. The drugs worked better than I thought, one of the things that had prevented healing taking place over the summer was the tenseness in the shoulder muscles from low level pain. That tenseness and the inability to relax the shoulder was nibbling away and not improving the situation at all. The drugs relieved some of that tenseness, allowing the shoulder to get on with repairing itself. I don't normally trust drugs of any kind but they helped a lot here.

Me being young a daft didn't really take in all the implications of all this at the time, my Indestructible mindset took a few more weeks and one televised baseball game to adjust. I'd been watching the Florida Marlins especially in the first year we had live baseball over here and one excellent pitcher called Alex Fernandez. The televised game was the one we had after he suffered a potentially career ending injury, it would be at least 18 months before they allowed him to throw again. What did he break ? He'd picked up a rotator cuff tear, just like me. The lights started to go on at this point and I started taking my injury a lot more seriously.

I'd been prescribed resting of the shoulder and as little work as possible on it, which suited me just fine :-) I was back into 4th year uni at this point and "heavy lifting" and "student" are not usually found in the same sentence together. I was able to keep playing cricket as I bat and keep wicket as well as bowl, just I was banned from bowling for a while. Plus I had no team to play for.

Right - I've been going on for a while, time to stop rambling, get my breakfast (1pm here!) and get down to some cricket watching. How is the shoulder now ?

A few years after I got the injury, I had another team and was bowling again :-) And helped my adopted team raise themselves to win a cup competition. I got some rather critical wickets in the final :-) I've bowled occasionally for the outdoor team at work but am now pretty much restricted to batting and fielding for them now. I can carry things in my right hand without thinking my arm will fall off. I need occasional 'maintenance' on it because the shoulder moves enough to restrict blood flow to my right arm making my arm feel cold. I was captain of the indoor cricket team that we had going in my team at work and bowled well enough to get respect of batsmen facing me (which isn't actually a good thing as it meant less liberties taken and less wickets!).

I'm not a cripple, I have about 95% use of the shoulder and it's mostly pain free. I think the pain I get from my right arm area now is a new injury that I can't trace ... it's lower down and in my side. There's a "hitch" in there that happens when I'm bowling, which has destroyed my slow bowling motion and affected my quicker bowling. To get around it, I have to try bowling quicker which makes it more dangerous when the hitch occurs and makes the ball come down head high. Maybe I have one of those bone spurs that are mentioned in the article I linked above.

Why is this Wake Up Call Number 1 ? Before this happened, I'd had a few major(ish) injuries before. I regularly suffered from soreshins (shinsplints) and troublesome knees due to having leg muscles that are larger than average. I also wrenched something in the lumbar area of my back getting my best ever bowling figures. All three of those come back to haunt me occasionally. But none of them really pierced the belief in my own Indestructibility.

Wake Up Call Number 1 - the shoulder injury wasn't going to fix easily and broke the youthful feelings of being Indestructible.
Wake Up Call Number 2 (addon - see link for Head vs Cricketball!) - was potentially life threatening.

I've gotten rid of the psychological effects of the head injury but I'm still struggling to break the after effects of the shoulder problem. I'm half convinced that the "hitch" I mentioned above is me unconsciously protecting the shoulder and I catch myself doing the same with badminton. I can get into position to do big smash shots but I've not actually pulled the trigger yet. Which can be more awkward to handle as the person on the other side is expecting something coming with flames following it instead of an innocent little drop shot :-)

It's structurally sound again, which means the long term treatment is sensible exercise and use. I don't bowl due to the risk to the person at the other end but that's about the only conscious limitation I'm putting in. More "hair of the dog" on Wednesday with badminton and my knees seem to be a little more interested in cooperating :-)