whaaa happened?

well, i just called my doctor's office to see what days he usually does surgeries - for some reason i have convinced myself that i want surgery on a thursday - if it's arthroscopic, then i have 3 full days to recover and should be back at work the following monday.

my doctor is on vacation and gets back on august 7. this i knew. what i didn't know was that his medical assistant does all the scheduling for surgeries, etc. she's also on vacation. the receptionist gave me the assistant's voice mail, but on it she said she wasn't going to be checking it so don't leave a message. can't schedule surgery until the 7th. boo.

so, the possible silver lining: more hockey games before surgery.

or, does that just mean i am openly tempting fate and am asking for the "bad" version of the surgery? should i keep playing?

i have been toying with a new mental approach when it comes to this shoulder injury i've got going on. 10 weeks of physical therapy didn't help things, so next in line were the drugs. after an injection of cortisone on June 15 that did nothing except make my weekend painful (and made me miss at least 2 hockey games), the good doctor (Dr. W.) decided it was time for an mri. had that last wednesday and it was much noisier than i had remembered. noise aside, i nearly fell asleep more than once.

but i had been good. the power of positive thinking, right? well, i went with it. what the heck. i figured at the very worst, i'd need it scoped and i'd be back on the ice in 2 months.

saw Dr. W. yesterday to get the mri results. he looked at them quietly, pulled out my initial xrays from earlier this year, then said i had to go get a new xray. 15 minutes later, new xray in hand, Dr. W. stared at it for a bit, then had me hop on the table for another physical exam. yup, still hurts. the scans came back up and he told me that i've got all the symptoms of impingement. duh, i knew this. thing is, he's never seen it occur in anyone my age. (he called me young!) he performed a diagnostic test by injecting novocaine into my shoulder. it was amazing - within 2 minutes, my shoulder felt 75% better. too bad it was temporary. and, too bad it told him that i do in fact have impingement. not only that, but the mri shows him that i have fraying of the supraspinatus (a rotator cuff tendon). the xrays show him that my acromion seems thicker than normal.

quick version: i need arthroscopic surgery. he hopes that this will be a simple fix, but if, after inspection of the joint, he sees that there's a partial tear of the tendon or worse, he'll have to go to open surgery. that means a 6 month recovery. lovely. better yet, i won't know if it's a quick fix or if i'm in for the long haul until i wake up. and, either i'll go home that day or stay at the surgery center overnight. again, lovely.

needless to say, i'm not feeling great right now. what 20-year old has a degenerative disc that requires fusion of lumbar vertebrae? now i get to add another "shouldn't happen" to the list - premature fraying and general wear and tear of my shoulder. look out, i could fall tomorrow and break my hip. >:-(

on a good note: Dr. W. is now out of town until August 7, so surgery won't be until at least then. that means i'm going to skate with my red team this sunday and will Burninate at the end of the month. you might say i probably shouldn't skate either slot because i could make things worse, but screw it. i'm already getting cut open, i'm going to have fun before it happens.

rawr.

i will try to get back to posting more often.

i will try to update my flickr more often.

i will try to be a better citizen of da intarwebz.

i've been flying low lately, as in way under the radar. mostly due to feeling either meh, blah, or rawr, but i'm trying hard to work my way out of it.

i have been sad for the past 2 days because i went to the Giants game with my mom, dad, and Gouda on saturday. well, yeah, the Giants make me sad a lot, but what made me upset was that i forgot my camera and forgot to ask the usher (or anyone else) to take a picture of the 4 of us with Justin's camera. on the drive home, i realized it's probably the last game that all four of us will go to together. fortunately, everyone is doing fine health-wise, but we left early because the whole day was just too much for my dad and he was getting really tired.

so, i've been kicking myself for the past 2 days. we have gone to so many games together over the years, back to the Candlestick days when there were fewer than 10,000 people at the game. yet, there was my dad, taking time off from preparing lectures or grading exams to drive me 2 hours each way. often it was the whole family, but sometimes it was just me and my dad. we'd freeze during the entire game but he never complained. i just had to be there when the gates opened, otherwise it seemed to me that i wasn't a loyal fan. he didn't complain. i never wanted to leave early even if it was an awful game, again with the loyalty thing. he didn't complain. i recently came across a stack of ticket stubs from the Giants games we'd been to from 1987 through the early 2000s. it was over 1.5 inches thick. i thought of all those miles and all that time my parents invested in driving their maniacal fan of a daughter up to the games, never complaining. i gave them hugs and thanked them again, but they both responded by saying that they enjoyed going, there was no reason to thank them.

i'm at the point now, 48 hours later, that i can sit and think about saturday's game and not completely crumble. i am glad that we went as a family and got to spend the day together. after dinner in town here, they drove back down to Monterey. i got the phone call that they had arrived at home, safe and sound, and could relax. i hope my dad was able to enjoy being at the ballpark. i know it wasn't an easy day for him but he was a trooper through the whole thing and, as always, he didn't complain once.