Catching Up with Larry

It's been 18 days since Larry had surgery on his rotator cuff. Here is what happened. Some time around Thanksgiving he was taking the garbage out, missed the last step by the driveway, and went tumbling down - landed on his left shoulder. He didn't even tell me about it for several days until he was in a lot of pain from the injury. He tried taking Tylenol for the pain, just thinking it was a slight bruise or something, but the pain never went away - only got worse. So he made an appointment to see Dr. Jackson, one of the famous orthopedic brothers in the area. Larry also selected him because he's a bishop in our stake and Larry knows him because of high council visits he had made (larry that is).

Dr. Jackson did the MRI and all that stuff and saw that he had what he thought was a tear in his rotator cuff and he' d have to have surgery within 3 months in order to avoid long-term damage. Larry waited and suffered through Christmas, and finally scheduled the surgery for January 7. I went with him to the surgical center. He was in very good spirits even though he had heard that rotator cuff surgery was an extremely painful recovery process. I think we both just set our minds to the fact that the following three-month recovery was going to be quite difficult, but we had to go through it.

All went very well. In fact, when I spoke with Dr. Jackson while Larry was coming out of the anesthesia, he said that the damage wasn't as bad as what he thought he would be and that the recovery time would be cut from 3 months to 6 weeks. That was such GOOD news. The doc showed me photos of what the inside looked like during the surgery, but I couldn't tell squat about it except for the tied off purple twine stuff that was putting the cuff back together. When Larry came out of surgery, he was all bound up in a huge sling that he had to wear for several days.

Well, to make a long story short, Larry has done marvelously well. He never complained, except when I was too rough trying to help get him dressed every day. He slept and still occasionally sleeps in a lounge chair in our bedroom because he just can't get comfortable in the bed yet without hurting the shoulder. But he's progressing very well. He wore the sling for about a week and that's all. It was kind of funny because we went to a High Council dinner on Friday after his surgery on Monday, and he was all bound up in his sling. All the council members and stake presidency walked over, slapped him on his shoulder, and said, "Well, what happened to you?" I think he had to explain the injury more times than he really cared to.

He's still recovering, but is doing so much better. He's getting as much mileage out of the surgery as he can too. For example, when I kidded him about helping me put clean sheets on the bed last night, he kind of whined and said that he had a hurt arm.

We are both so grateful for modern medicine that helps us so much. If I have time, I'll write about his three endoscopies that took place the end of last year.