The good news is I don’t have a frozen shoulder. My doctor admits I have a bit of a chilly one, though.
It’s been 7 weeks since I last went to see him about my rotator cuff injury. Since then, I’ve been attending weekly massage therapy sessions. A couple of weeks ago, we had a breakthrough—I can now sometimes, depending on the day, undo my bra behind my back! After months of slipping the straps off my shoulders, this was a real coup.
The bad news is that while I WILL recover, I’ve had this injury about a year now and then the super-duper injury that exacerbated the first injury, for about 4 months. So, I will recover, but the process is slllllllllllooooooooww. I’m to continue with my strengthening exercises and the massage therapy treatments, although my therapist has been given the green light to extend the treatments to ten days or two weeks between, depending how I do. If I don’t progress, it’s back to weekly treatments.
The fantastic news is that I don’t need an MRI or surgery. My rather excellent massage therapist’s hard work has helped my chilly shoulder from developing into a frozen one, for which I am thankful.
My personally set progress meter about being able to undo my bra behind my back has led me to discovering that not everyone can do this, whether they have an injured shoulder or not. My husband definitely can’t undo his bra behind his back. Well, he doesn’t wear a bra so that would partially explain it. Also, he used to have very flexible joints and could wrap his right arm around his head and touch his right ear:
Plus, he was heavy into sports. Maybe I asked him to wrap his arm around his head one too many times (I could NEVER do that), or maybe it was all the basketball and golf and skiiing and curling. Whatever, his range of motion is now more limited than mine, as far as the bra test goes. Which got me to wondering…do men lose the flexibility to undo their nonexistent bras behind their backs because if you don’t use it, you lose it? Any men out there reading this? Can you undo your imaginary bra behind your back? Can you zip up your imaginary dress zipper behind your back? Can you hook the little hook at the top of the zipper behind your neck? No? Well, welcome to womanhood. Or womanhood with sucky flexibility. I used to take those little things for granted. Now, my left arm mocks my right one. But I shall persevere. My goal is mutual arm mocking.
