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Week 8 and 9 - Things go retrograde

Over the next week I go over to stay with my mother, and have a family lunch. I wear side fastening trousers, without thinking it through properly. It is not physically possible for me to undo the zip, as my left hand cannot move round my side towards the back, and has no strength to support the waist to give the right hand something to pull against. Luckily I am with family, so my cousin, aunt and mother all end up having to help at various stages in the day.

I am losing what little movement I had in my left arm, and the pain has become quite intense. I have to keep moving during the day - anything more than 10 minutes in one position hurts. At night, I am back to not sleeping. Every time I lie down my arm starts to seize within a few minutes. The only thing I can do is sit up again, grab my left arm just above the elbow, and pull it downwards until the pain goes. I try to lie down while pulling my arm downwards to stop it seizing up. This generally works only for a few minutes.

So the nights become a pattern of lying down, sitting up to wait for the pain to pass, then repeating. I don't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time, and between 2am and 5am it is just so bad that I get not sleep. I don't know why those hours are so bad, but it's the same every night. I'm exhausted, and I have to go back to work next week. Things aren't looking good.

I go for some runs, thinking that I'm in so much pain anyway that it can't make it worse, and maybe it will make me tired enough to sleep through the pain. It doesn't work. 

The physio is also concerned, and starts mentioning frozen shoulder a lot. I hear that one of her other clients, with a similar injury two weeks ahead of mine, is now done with physio and has recovered her ROM.

I get more obsessive about googling other people's experiences, but can't find anyone who had this progression.

I start back at work, wearing the sling again, as the pain coupled with having to carry a laptop around isn't much fun. I don't enjoy public transport at rush hour either.

It occurs to me that it's foolish to keep going through this pain and hope to magically find an answer through google, when I have a perfectly good specialist who could actually tell me what the hell has gone wrong, so I make an appointment with Mr Shoulder. I'm not sure how he's going to take it, given he told he didn't need to see me for 2 months, and here I am two weeks later back and whining about pain. 

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