An Over Due Update

It's been way too many months later, and I would love to say the reason is because I haven't had anything to update on, but that isn't quite the case. My first year of collage, an awesome babysitting job, and a few too many EDS issues have keept me busy over the past couple months. Now that I'm on summer vacation, after a successful first year of college, I hope to be a little better at keeping things up to date.

I suppose I should start where I left off; the shoulder issue. My shoulder is just about the same as it was in October. I did several months of intense PT to try to tighten things up, and strengthen my muscles, but my shoulder just didn't quite play along. In December I got a second opinion (recommended by my EDS specialist) for my shoulder to make sure that I was with the right doctor and to make sure I was doing the correct treatment, as well as to see if this other doctor had any other options available for me. I could say many things about that doctor I saw for a second opinion, but to sum things up, he just wasn't the right fit for me.

Like I wrote in an earlier post (You Win Some, You Loose Some-10/5/11) , finding a doctor who works with you is extremely important as an EDS patient. To me, my doctors are my team. We're all teammates and everyone involved has to feel that way for treatment to be successful, because let's be honest- I am not a textbook case and my doctors are not going to always have all the answers. I need a doctor on my team who realizes this and who is willing to invest time in my case to work with me and to find something that works; this doctor I saw for a second opinion just wasn't a good fit for my team.

After that appointment, I saw another doctor in my Sports Medicine office in town (who I had seen a year or two earlier for initial shoulder consult- and who operated on my brother a couple years ago for a broken clavicle). She is my current shoulder doctor and she totally understands my case. She works closely with my PT, which is important and she understands that she doesn't have all the answers. We decided that PT wasn't working, which we already knew. She agreed that it made sense to stop PT at that time since I wasn't advancing. We discussed surgical options, but she thought that it was up to me and how my quality of life was. We talked about how my subluxations and dislocations were not doing any permeant damage, so it was not going to put me worse off if I decided to wait to have surgery.

At first I felt like planing to have surgery over my winter break this year would make sense, and that's what we planned on. Now looking at it, I'm not sure I'm ready to have surgery. My shoulder is unstable, but at this point it is something that I can adapt to without negatively effecting my quality of life too much. This is something that is hard for people to understand, but I know that there are great risks for me going into surgery. Being realistic, I will have complications and my recovery won't be easy, thanks to EDS. For me to go into surgery understanding that, I have to be at my last thread, I have to know that my daily life is so effected by my issue that it is worth the risk of undergoing surgery and knowing that there is a chance that the operations won't provide long term relief. As of right now, I'm planning on waiting to have surgery, at least for this year.