Tuesday afternoon I traveled to Great Bend to see Dr. L.T. Fleske, M.D., of the Central Kansas Orthapedic Group, about my left shoulder that dislocated last month.
The news from Fleske wasn’t good. He prescribed surgery to fix my wing.
He said my ligaments and my labrum were torn loose and balled up in the joint. He said he’d need to reattach those to the ball of the shoulder joint and make sure there wasn’t anything else in need of repair.
In order to do this, he said he would probably need to make an incision, and he said I would be in a sling for six weeks and be out of any real commission for six months.
I wasn’t very happy about this diagnosis, especially after waiting almost two hours past my appointment time to see him, but I must admit I was expecting surgery. It is the half-year recovery time that bothers me the most. It will drive me crazy to not be able to do whatever I want for that long.
One a little bit of a brighter note, after I tried to read my own MRI scan, I have learned I wasn’t completely correct. That fracture I wrote about isn’t exactly a fracture. Fleske said it is a compaction, which means the bone now has an indentation from when it dislocated and smacked against other bones in the joint. Basically, he said it gave and smashed a little like pushing on Styrofoam, but it isn’t a fracture in the normal sense of the word. It’s more like a groove.
Also, as I said earlier, I won’t have to have a shoulder replacement, which is good too.
So the question remains: when and where am I having surgery? Well, I don’t know yet. I need to make that decision and get it scheduled. I’m hoping I find a date that works soon. I want to get this done and finished as soon as possible so I can get on the mend.
I will post on here when I get a surgery date scheduled. Stay tuned.
