wshaffer

So, I haven't posted much about my frozen shoulder recovery in a while, because there was a long stretch of many months which felt like an exercise in learning how small an increment of progress could be and still be progress. However, in the past month, I've gained a remarkable amount of range of motion.

The funny thing is that a lot of this progress happened during the two weeks when I was traveling in the U.K., and not doing much work on the shoulder beyond a bit of soft tissue work with a lacrosse ball. On the other hand, I was getting plenty of sleep, walking 3-6 miles a day, and not stressing about stuff, which sounds like a pretty good recipe for fighting general inflammation. The lesson I'm drawing here is not that my PT exercises are useless, but that progress is non-linear.

I'm also incredibly excited that the other mobility work I've been doing with my trainer seems to be paying off as well. My hip and knee mobility are visibly improving.

And, just to lay to rest any worries that I had along the lines of, "Well, this mobility stuff is great and all, but does it mean that I have to give up making strength gains?" I deadlifted 140 lbs this morning.

I'm not dead! It's just been a slightly hectic past few weeks.

Something I learned about time management: I thought that I was being tremendously clever in scheduling most of my physical therapy appointments in the early morning, so I could get them over with and get on with my day. I forgot that with the increasingly close collaboration I have with colleagues in different time zones, early morning is also practically the only time we have to hold important work meetings. This has turned my work schedule for the past few weeks into something akin to a slightly stressful game of temporal Tetris. I've learned my lesson - my last two physical therapy appointments are scheduled for early afternoon. It will mean a bit more driving back and forth, but I think I'll be saner.

Physical therapy is going pretty well. I'm not all better yet, but I've got a pretty functional range of movement in everything except the "reaching up between my shoulder blades" movement, which remains sticky.

And then I got a horrible cold and lay around at home for a few days. Daniel, who knows how to look after a sick Wendy very well, brought me a few liters of diet ginger ale, and the DVDs of the BBC's recent production of The Hollow Crown - Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), and Henry V. I watched Richard II and thought it was an excellent production. The cast is basically a who's who of British actors, but Ben Whishaw is particularly good as Richard II. Richard II is a difficult role to play, because he's basically someone who is making a great outward show of being king without having the decisiveness or the political savvy to back it up. I think my initial reaction to reading the play was basically, "For god's sake, kid, hand over the crown to Bolingbroke and put us all out of our misery." But when you see the role played by an actor with real charisma, it really changes the play, because you half buy into Richard's image of himself. My only quibble with this version is that they cut down the farewell scene between Richard and his queen, which I remember being really heartbreaking in the Arkangel Shakespeare audio version of the play, and in this version was merely mildly heartstring-tugging.

Also, I think maybe they over-egged the visual coding of Richard as effeminate and Bolingbroke as manly. Because there's really no connection between having fabulous hair and wearing pink and being ineffectual at governance. (Ben Whishaw does have fabulous hair in this, though. If the BAFTA awards had a category for best performance by a ringlet, this would have been a shoe-in.)

Looking forward to watching the rest of the set. Which has Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal/Henry V. Niiice.

So, I just had my follow up on the MRI of my shoulder. Basically:
* I have a "very tiny" partial tear of the rotator cuff.
* I have "a lot" of inflammation in the shoulder joint.
* My shoulder is structurally "totally normal".

The upshot of which is: Left to its own devices, the injury will probably just get better slowly over the course of the next few months. In the hopes of hustling it along a bit, we're going to try physical therapy and follow up in a month. There is an outside chance that if the inflammation is stubborn, I might still need surgery, but it's pretty unlikely.