Yesterday was shoulder surgery day. My mom accompanied me while Dean stayed home with kids. I went into the surgery knowing that there would be a 25% chance that the surgeon would do a SLAP tear repair, which would mean 5-6 weeks in an immobilizer brace. Otherwise, it was just debriding my AC joint to relieve the arthritis pain, and removing the bone spur that has been digging into my rotator cuff, and initial recovery meant a couple days in a sling.
The nurses told my mom that there would be a monitor in the individual family waiting room and that she could watch the scope portion of my procedure. How cool is that?! After I changed into my gown and got my IV inserted, mom and I worked out how to get Skype on her iPhone so that she could share the video, live, with Dean and the kids. Then I had a nice video chat with Dean and the kids before the anesthesiologist came in to put in my nerve block. The nerve block meant injecting a strong local around the brachial nerve bundles, so that my entire arm would go numb. I got to watch on the small ultrasound monitor as he positioned the needle in a variety of locations. Shortly after that my arm grew very heavy. Then it tingled. My diaphragm on the right side grew heavy, making a deep breath impossible, and my right eyelid drooped. All normal, and all quite strange. Pretty soon he came back in and asked me to move the fingers on my right hand. Try as hard as I might, they would not move. That meant it was time for surgery.
They wheeled me from pre-op into the operating room. With quite a lot of assistance, I moved from the gurney to the operating table. A nurse asked me to hold my numb arm to my chest as she positioned me better. I looked down, and there was this limp, strange arm, flopped on top of my chest. That wasn't my arm!?!? My arm was still laying by my side ... I could still feel the heaviness of it touching my hip! I looked again. There was no arm resting by my side. I was so utterly confused... I grabbed this 'fake' arm that I would swear was not mine and held onto it. Apparently it was heavy, because it slipped from my left hand's grasp, and I had to make a quick grab before it flopped off the right side of the table. It felt like I was holding a dead hand. Not that I have any idea what that would feel like, but I wasn't thinking too clearly. The nurse took my arm back and strapped on the oxygen mask and then I felt the warm, blissful tingle of anesthesia in my IV. Five seconds later I was out.
I opened my eyes and it was over. It took barely an hour. The nurse helped me put my clothes on, followed by a sling and a humongous ice pack. I had to walk to the recovery area. I chatted with mom as I sipped some water and munched some crackers. There was no need to do the SLAP repair, so the surgery went quickly and I only had to wear a sling. Mom pulled up the car and we drove home.
The day went by quickly, but it was extremely weird to have this lifeless limb attached to me. I didn't do much, but every time I moved, my arm would slip in the sling. I would walk around the kitchen and look down and notice that my thumb, hooked in the thumb strap, was bent back at a 120 degree angle as my arm was falling forward out of the sling. At one point, when Rylan accompanied me to the bathroom, my whole arm slipped from the sling and just hung there. I just looked at it, not really processing that it was my arm, swaying back and forth.
The nerves started to wake up around midnight. I could twitch my fingertips, ever so slightly. By 5 a.m. the block had worn off completely and the pain was bad. It's been an on/off day. The Vicodin makes me a bit woozy the first half hour I take it. Then I'm a little fuzzy in the head. When it wears off, the pain is pretty awful. I hope that each day to come the pain decreases and the mobility gets better. Well, I should hope so - isn't that what this surgery was supposed to fix in the first place?
I'm just glad that by sheer providence I have six straight days of nothing to do. Dean ran Rylan to dance last night, and mom took her to karate today. I needed help showering and dressing today, but I hope for a little more independence tomorrow. We'll see...
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