Today is 38 days after my shoulder surgery to repair three tears in my right shoulder. I can now move my arm. It still hurts, but I can move it. I am having a lot of pain in my lower arm, too, which I wouldn’t have expected. My range of motion is improving, but I had a bit of a set-back in my recovery last week.

Every night, I wake up around 3:00 AM with arm and shoulder pain. It’s a little difficult to go back to sleep after that. That pain is much better during the day and then in the evening it starts to get sore and stiffen up again.

The physical therapists where I go are divided into ‘teams’. There are three people on my team (that I know of). I don’t like the idea of ‘teams’ with physical therapy. I think it would be much better to work with the same person every time. That way we would know exactly where we left off.

I have had three physical therapy visits so far. On my first visit the therapist basically just checked how far I could move my arm and gave me a few minor exercises. On the second physical therapy visit I worked with a different therapist. She began by putting a heating pad on my arm to help loosen it up a bit, then she did a few stretches with me and showed me some new exercises.

Physical Therapy Gone Wrong, Third Visit
The third physical therapy was four days later and I believe this is where things went wrong. I saw a different person again (the third person I had seen in three visits). This therapist said, in a disapproving way, that I should be able to move my arm further by now. He tried to move my arm way beyond where it was possible for it to go. He wanted to make drastic improvements on my range of motion in one visit. I believe that he was on the wrong page of the “protocol” the doctor had given them. Even if he was on the right page of the protocol, my arm was not ready to be pushed as far as he pushed it. The other therapists were not like this at all; they didn’t cause me a horrible amount of pain. After this visit, my elbow became inflamed and it was very difficult to straighten my arm out for about five days. I believe he caused me a lot of unnecessary pain. I had to cancel the rest of my physical therapy visits last week and I could hardly move my arm for a few days afterward.

On Friday, I called and changed my ‘team’. In order to change my team, I have to start over. Now this week I am going for an assessment again on Thursday. Until then, I am going to try and do a lot of stretching exercises on my own.

Physical therapy can be done without a horrible amount of pain. I had shoulder surgery in August 2012 on my left shoulder, and went through all of the physical therapy without anyone causing pain like the therapist did last week. Not only did he cause me a lot of pain, but he wasn’t very nice. I think he should get into another line of work.