And what, exactly, does air conditioning have to do with my shoulder? Yes, I did ask that. It seemed amusing at the time but then, I was also in some amount of pain.
As you can probably guess, that happened to me. How? Well, stupidity is really the root of it. Was making a U-Turn on my bike and slowed down too much. Hit too much brake, I believe. Well, if you’ve ever ridden a bicycle or a motorcycle, they behave much the same when when they aren’t going. They fall. And so … my bike fell over on the left side and I fell with it. Hit the road pretty hard on my left shoulder. My head also hit the street, but I was wearing my helmet so that just felt like a little bump. I was also wearing my jacket, which has padding and protective armor. On the shoulder, even, but it’s more towards the top of the shoulder rather than the side. Still, the jacket prevented me from getting any road rash at all.
That said, my shoulder hurt. A lot. And it had no strength at all. So … off to the hospital I went. I didn’t think that anything was broken, but I did think that I had a dislocated shoulder. Not quite. Turns out that a shoulder separation is different. You can read about it here but, in short, it’s when the junction of the clavical (collarbone) and the scapula (shoulder blade) are separated. And mine just happens to be a Grade 3 separation. A dislocation involves the humerus (upper arm bone) coming out of the socket.
It’s getting better now … when I went to the ER, I couldn't move my left arm much without some pretty serious pain. Taking off my t-shirt was tedious, to say the least. Now, while I still have a good deal of soreness, I can move my arm almost all around without too much pain. Lifting or anything that requires any amount of strength, however, still hurts.
Here’s a shot from my XRay.
You can see the collarbone sticking up … even up to produce a lump on my shoulder. Doc says that I’ll have this forever unless I get surgery … and the surgery is optional at this point and would mainly be done for cosmetic reasons. So I’ll pass.