Description

An admitted shoe geek waxes philosophical about running, triathlon, and life in general.
Comments welcome!


Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Slices of me...

I've been having some shoulder trouble lately, and the funny thing is I haven't been swimming. Nada. Nothing since September when the local YMCA did a bait-and-switch on the pool schedule rendering my (low-cost) membership useless. They allowed me to cancel it immediately, as I was EXACTLY 30 days from when I activated it, but that was the last time I got in the water.

So it can't be "swimmer's shoulder", because I haven't been swimming.


Right?


I think it happened when I was changing the re-mounting the wheel on my car in the (steep) driveway, after plugging a hole made by a 1/4" bolt that had lodged itself through the tread.


Anyway, I went in some 3 weeks ago for the initial exam, and after a lot of painful manipulation demonstrating the limits (and way beyond) of my pain-free mobility, he declared a suspected torn labrum, and ordered up an arthrogram.


For those who might not know, an arthrogram is an MRI with contrast, a liquid pumped into the joint via a needle threaded INTO the joint capsule.

Strangely enough, my wife has been having similar issues with her shoulder, and had gone through an arthrogram just a week before mine. She'd had considerable pain when they were injecting the contrast. Me, being the wimp I am, was dreading that part of the procedure. I'm not all that fond of needles (though you'd think I'd be okay with it, given that I have to go through many blood draws to track medication levels due to my colitis).

But I've got to give Paul at Sound Medical Imaging props -- aside from the first poke, that part of the procedure was nearly painless. 

The other part of it was that going with Sound Medical Imaging go me into the procedure a good two weeks before the place my doctor had originally sent me to to get the arthrogram.

So anyway, after listening to classic rock, being fed into a tube and told several times to hold my breath and not move (just for short periods of time), I walked out of there with a CD of all these images, like a spiral sliced ham laid out like a deck of cards that is my left shoulder.

The phrase "any way you slice it" comes to mind...

So that was over two weeks ago. I (finally) have the follow-up appointment tomorrow morning to go over the results. Hopefully it's something that's easily fixed... Even though I haven't been swimming, I still want to be able to click off a few laps.

1 comment:

Christopher Morelock said...

Good luck at the appointment, hopefully no slices are required!