How I made 2020 the year I took my rusted out clunker of a body to the Flesh Mechanics and got some overdue work done.
Well I’ve been out of the lifting life for quite a while. But the good news is it wasn’t because I quit or just got lazy. It was because in 2019 I injured my shoulder lifting an empty bar off my squat rack… WHAT!?! Yep, I received a severed tendon in my shoulder lifting an empty bar off my squat rack in an awkward way that caused a bone spur to stab through it. Absolutely embarrassing and it put me out of the game. This started me on what I knew even then was going to be a year’s long journey of surgeries and recovery.
I actually had three things wrong with me and all of them needed addressing. I had a torn meniscus in my right knee and a mysterious lump on my shoulder that had been growing over the years, so what better way than to just deal with them all at once? First thing I had to deal with was a hard lump on my shoulder. This lump, known as a Lipoma, not only made it painful to do squats as the bar would rest right on it, it was going to be in the way of the sling both me and my doctor knew I was going to be wearing a very long time.
In November 2019 I went under the knife and the surgeon removed what was the smushed golfball-sized tumor from my trapezius. This left my muscle with a crater that today is a barely noticeable dent that you need to rub with a finger to feel.
So now the next step was to fix my knee. I had my surgery scheduled for just four months later. Three days before the surgery, Janet Mills, the communist governor of Maine (with no medical degree) decided my surgery was not important and shut it down because of the Wu-flu. This sent me into a defeated state where I had no idea if I would ever be able to get the surgeries I needed, let alone when. I waited by the phone with very little hope.
Eventually in March 2020 I received a call out of the blue informing me that if I still wanted the surgery, they were authorized to perform a limited number of them and I was in the top of the waiting list and that they could do me in 48 hours… so I jumped on that immediately and went back under the knife for a second time.
I came out of the surgery with a leg I couldn’t even feel for three days as they gave me a nerve blocker. They removed the torn piece of meniscus and polished the joint to eliminate the sever arthritis I also was suffering from.
So I enjoyed my down time and fired up the old game systems I hadn’t touched in years. To my amazement I was cleared to put a little pressure on the leg the next day. By day three I was able to stand without crutches.
On day four I was able to remove my wrappings and wash my leg for the first time. With all the down time I had, I was able to completed reading the book The Way Of Men.
It was only two weeks and the stitches were able to come out and I had a brand new knee that was free of arthritis and pain… although it was still sensitive to being overworked and as I found out a couple months later, would become severely inflamed and swollen because I wasn’t babying it.
Four months later in July 2020 my big and final day came. For the third time in less than twelve months I went under the knife. When I awoke my entire right side was dead, totally numb. I was also on a machine that monitored my blood oxygen levels. This was because the nerve blocker they used on my also effected my diaphragm and made breathing hard. My friend who was to pick me up from the hospital wasn’t getting out of work for another few hours so all I had time to do was just lay there and enjoy the in-and-out consciousness. Every so often the machine would start beeping and the nurse tending to me would rouse me and tell me to take deep breaths, as I had begun to breath real shallow.
When it came time to go home I was finally able to grasp the hardware I was bound in. My whole shoulder was wrapped in ice packs and my arm in a sling with a bumper pillow keeping it out away from my body. It felt like I was wearing hard body armor.
First thing the surgeon did was to grind off the bone spur, which was jutting out from the bottom of my scapula’s Acromial Angle, that stabbed a hole through my tendon. The cleaned holed is visible in the second photo above. The second step was to clean up the severe arthritis I had where my Clavicle and Coracoid process was rubbing. They cleaned up the shoulder joint a little and made everything sparkle, except for the portion of the bone where my tendon was to be reattached. This was to make the bone raw so when it heals it will bond with the tendon. Then anchors were embedded into the end of my scapula and Kevlar sutures run through them to my tendon. Everything was pulled tight together, sewed mu up and done.
After four days I was free to take all the gauze and padding off to reveal six stab wounds where they went in to work. Unlike my knee, this recovery wasn’t going to be just a matter of weeks, but months. Six months to be exact.
I almost never use pain killers, especially the hard stuff. But this one had me on a 3-hour alternating regiment of Acetaminophen and Neproxen Sodium for weeks.
I had to wear my sling 23-7, only able to take it off while showering. I had to sleep in chairs all night until my family woke so I could have my bed to myself. After my wife got out of bed I would lie down on my left width-wise across the bed, prop a pillow behind me to prevent me from rolling, turn on Netflix, hug a pillow with it jammed into my armpit and PASS THE FUCK OUT. The aching was endless. This went on for six weeks.
After three solid months of wearing a sling I was cleared to take it off and chuck it in the dumpster behind the doctor’s office. In that time I had almost become completely left handed and due to hanging my arm off my shirt when not in my sling, I had developed a bad habit of continuing to do it.
Now came the physical therapy. Months and months of physical therapy. Finally at the end of January 2021 I was cleared by my doctors to do all the normal things in life… including weight lifting. But I am back to square one again and with uneven arm development. I have a new body and it’s time to get my right arm as big as my left again.
