Breakthrough!

233 days post-surgery, 57 days post-MUA…

I had a breakthrough yesterday in PT. while standing straight up, I was able to raise my left arm (actively, under my own power and with no external support or help) over my head – past the critical transition phase.

It was very slow, probably taking me 30 seconds or more. Also somewhat uncomfortable. But it was a first! Prior to this I always had to manually re-position my shoulder to get it to move smoothly. I could also move smoothly while lying flat on my back or on my side. But upright has been a challenge.

One caveat – I was taped. My therapist has been taping my shoulder/back to help give it a small amount of mechanical help with this motion. I took off the tape tonight because it was itching and so far I haven’t been able to duplicate the movement. I’m not warmed up right now so I’m pretty stiff. So this isn’t very surprising. I’ll do a good 30-60 minutes of PT before bed tonight and I’m hoping I can achieve this again today. I did duplicate my breakthrough at my home PT session last night, so it wasn’t a one-time fluke.

This is very encouraging to me. Until this point, all of the PT had felt very academic, because it wasn’t translating to practical gains in day-to-day usage. But once I can unlock this motion, it should be a steady march towards normalcy. I was starting to lose hope that this would happen at all. But now that I’ve done it once, I know that I can do it again.