Mr. Murphy strikes Again.

Just a quick note to chronicle the ups and downs of the recovery from my shoulder surgery. (And let me insert here - shoulder surgery = pain! I had naively thought that it wouldn't hurt as badly as either the c-section from you-know-where or the subsequent hysterectomy, two years later. After all, they weren't cutting through muscle this time, what was there to hurt? Exactly.) Anyway, roughly three weeks after my shoulder surgery, the Olympics started. And so we watched and stayed up very late every night. This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that school started sometime in there, along with a 6:45 a.m. bus schedule. You do the math, as far as hours of sleep are concerned. Add to that the physical stress of recovering from surgery and also the fact that our swamp cooler had conked out on us. In short, I was a wreck. (But I was enjoying the Olympics.) Well, one night I was really tired. I went to get in bed and Austin had already fallen asleep on my side of the bed. I good naturedly climbed into Hal's side of the bed since I wasn't supposed to move large objects yet, and Austin qualifies as a large object at this point in time. Sometime in the middle of the night I heard a loud "Thump!" and then Austin crying. He had fallen out of bed. So I, in my sleep deprived state rolled into the middle of the bed to check on him. The only problem was, I was still on Hal's side, so rolling into what I thought was the middle of the bed was actually a big mistake. I went down like a rock, landing square on my newly fixed shoulder. If someone had a video of the whole thing it would have been funny, seeing Austin roll off one side and then me immediately rolling off the other. Hal had stayed downstairs because it was just too bloody hot to sleep upstairs. If he'd been up there he would have either moved Austin or at least been on the other side of him, keeping him from falling out of the bed in the first place.

The dr. and phys. therapist both said I'd probably set myself back about 3 weeks (pretty much back to the time of the actual surgery). I never did fess up to the p.t. because I was so embarrassed about the whole thing. (You fell out of bed?)

So, anyway, a couple of months went by and my shoulder was starting to do well. That is until I got the bright idea to play baseball with the family. Hitting a ball with a metal bat that had most of the foam insulation ripped off was not a great thing to do. That one took a cortisone treatment to take care of the extreme pain I was in for 2 weeks. The only problem is that I left the patch on for too long (if an hour is good, then 2 hours is better, right?) The next day I ended up with a terrible cortisone flash (google it). That ended right about the time I had a terrible medical mistake happen to me so I don't know if the pain went away on its own, or because something else happened that hurt worse.

Anyway, that's the story of the ups and downs of my shoulder surgery recovery. (At least the low points. It is actually starting to do better, just very weak!)