When I was in high school I had traveling shoulders. By traveling, I do not mean that they visited Costa Rica or toured France solo; I mean that they had a bad habit of falling out of their sockets. This was unpleasant. I didn't technically dislocate them; they would slide out and slide in more or less on their own, but with considerable pain. I later learned that the technical term for this is "Subluxation" (temporary partial dislocation).

The subluxations went on for years. The first time it happened I was taking off my jacket (left side), then when I was waterskiing (both sides), then when I fell caving (both sides), and almost every time I threw a baseball (right side). I was careful to avoid any activities that made my shoulders feel at all 'slide-y', and gradually it improved, but I never really addressed the problem. Now I'm wishing that I had.

For more than ten years now, I have had a lot of pain in my back between the shoulder blades and funky crunching noises when I moved the wrong way. About three years ago, the pain became unbearable and I finally started going to a chiropractor. Between the chiropractics and the massage, there was some improvement but not a lot. My massage therapist commented that my shoulder doesn’t feel like other people's shoulders. It feels like there is something underneath it; it just doesn't move normally. I discovered in my yoga class that there are many things that everyone else in the class could do that I couldn’t, like balancing on my hands and knees, or holding my arm up above my head. My class was called “Gentle Yoga”, and some of the other students were twice my age but they seemed to handle without a hitch the motions that had me shaking with pain. Finally, after a bad week brought on by push-starting vehicles and carrying too many heavy groceries, I talked to my doctor who referred me to a Sports Doctor.

My appointment was this morning. The doctor asked many intelligent questions while taking my history. The doctor had me move my arms through all kinds of motions to assess where in my range of motion there was pain or popping under my shoulder blade. She tested my strength and compared my good arm to my bad. She looked at my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists, my back, my neck. She had me show her the motions that were a problem for me in yoga and then had me attempt push ups against the wall. I had x-rays of every possible angle of my shoulder, including on where I was lying face down on a foam thing with my face pressed into a pillow, my legs off one side of the table and my arm off the other, but propped up at a funny angle on another foam block. I must have looked ridiculous.

The results were both good and bad.

The good news is:
- my bones are all intact in that area: no fractures, no chips from the dislocations, and no arthritis (yay!).

The bad news is that I have (and remember that I might not have this right, it was a lot of information and I am not a doctor):

- multidirectional joint instability in both shoulders (and loose joints in my wrists)
- tendonitis in my left shoulder (and I already knew I had it in both wrists and elbows)
- bursitis in between my shoulder blade and thoracic wall, apparently it is inflamed enough that my left shoulder blade and the area around it is visibly different from the other side
- shoulder bursitis, also known as impingement syndrome (mild case in both shoulders)
- instead of sliding smoothly from side to side, my shoulder blades come away from my body at their lower central points when I do certain motions (which really is roughly what it feels like they are doing)

More good news:

- the doctor does not want me to have surgery
- the doctor does not want me to take any more pills
- the doctor wants to focus on strengthening the joint through physiotherapy
- the doctor believes that physiotherapy will lead to a decrease in pain, an increase in strength and an increase in joint stability (in both shoulders!!!)

A bit more bad news:
- I don't know if any of the treatment will be covered by health care
- I don’t know yet if any of it will be covered by my benefits
- I can’t really currently afford $88 for the first visit and $44 for each visit thereafter.

Despite the obvious negatives, I just can’t help being happy about the whole thing. It is a rare thing for me to get thorough medical care on anything. I am just so pleased that one of my problems has been thoroughly evaluated. I trust the doctor, the diagnosis makes sense, and I am quite pleased with the treatment plan. This just may be a first.

I feel like I’m on the path to recovery; that I’m finally traveling in the right direction rather than falling behind and moving backwards. I've got on my travelin' shoes.

One of these days I might realize that when people say that something hurts, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are feeling the same pain that I am (You’d think I would have learned this with my plantar fasciitis incident, but apparently not so much.) Everyone complains about their back hurting so when my back hurt for roughly 10-15 years, I thought that it was just the same as everyone else until I had almost overwhelming evidence otherwise. When I told the doctor today that the pain in my back and shoulder had woken me up more nights than not, for more than three years, she was incredulous. I could just hear her thinking, “why didn’t you say something sooner.”

Sometimes I am a dummy.

(Incidentally, the title of this entry has got Ruthie Foster’s “Death Came A-Knockin’ (Travelin’ Shoes)" stuck in my head:

“Den she shout:
Hallelujah!
Done done my duty
Got on my Travellin’ shoes!”)