Now, with pictures!

WARNING: If you are squeamish about photographs of the insides of bodies, if you get grossed out by those scenes on CSI where they show bullets penetrating people's organs, or you are my mother, you may want to skip this post, as it contains arthroscopic photographs from my surgery.

I believe that in an earlier post, I told you that I had a SLAP lesion of the second type, which means that there was a distinct tear in the tissue that is supposed to connect the labrum to the glenoid bone. Sounds clear enough, but here is what it looks like:

(That is my doctor's handwriting on there, from when he was explaining the surgery to the PP immediately after it was finished, before I had returned to the land of the unanesthetized. The blue-gray thing in the upper right is probably a tube for drainage and suction during the surgery--yummy.)

My doctor was also able to see some effects of the infection from last spring. In this photo, the top white area shows how the tissue in question should look, but notice that the tissue in the bottom half looks kind of frayed. Thank you, infection:

The doctor did two things during the surgery. First, he used a couple of anchors (yargh!) to reattach the labrum to the glenoid. The anchors are the sort of sparkly blue things in the upper right:


(Again, that black line is my doctor's writing, showing the contour of the glenoid bone, in order to make clear that there is no longer a tear. Thanks to the anchors (avast!), the tissue can grow back there, making the connection secure.)

Then he shaved down a bone spur, to give my shoulder joint more room to operate and prevent further impingement:


(That one is kind of weird, I think, since it so clear where the bone was filed.)

All in all, it should take care of the problems. Meanwhile, I am gradually weaning myself off the oxycodone (after ill effects from trying to quit cold turkey. . .). And I am already tired of my sling.