Life After A Shoulder Replacement
A shoulder REPLACEMENT PATIENT TESTIMONIAL FOR DR. Burns.
“So before my shoulder surgery, I was not functional at all.”
I'm right-handed and it was my right shoulder. Any daily activity was extremely painful and difficult. And there were so many things I just couldn't do.
And besides not being able to do them, I was in pain. I was in terrible pain all the time. Any little bit of motion for my shoulder was just really horrible.
It was so frustrating that I couldn't do basic activities; swimming, or playing sports, those things were well out of my reach. Those were never things I could even consider doing.
I tried pretty much everything. I did occupational therapy, physical therapy, countless steroid injections, I did cupping, I did acupuncture, I did tens units, I did a point stimulator. I had done everything for years, many, many years, and was just not functional. And I never was really told that I could get much better than what I was because it had been so long that I had been limited so far.
So I had met Dr. Burns at the hospital when he worked for the military hospital and when he saw me, we talked about it, he knew I already knew that I needed a replacement, he tried to convince me a couple years ago to do it. And so we knew I was at the point where I just had to have it done.
He was the only person I was going to trust to do this for me.
Because my shoulder had been bad for so long, we didn't expect me to get a normal range of motion. If I could get something functional, we were going to consider the surgery a success. And I was fine with that.
I've gotten almost normal range of motion back, in almost every direction and it's all pain-free. Every bit of my motion is pain-free and that's exceeded any expectations I had for myself. I'm just shocked that I'm doing as well as I am.
It's great that this has definitely changed my life. I tell people all the time that shoulder replacement surgery is probably the best thing I've ever done.
I can do whatever I want to do with my arm and I can live a normal life and do fun things that I would never expect I'd ever be able to do.