“My story of shoulder pain and rehab involves a bizarre pseudo skiing accident that happened in March of 2023,” begins 62-year old Lindsay. “I was on a chair lift with a young snowboarder on my right. He had his left foot forward in the board and kept resting his board on my skis. I kept saying to him, ‘Hey, buddy, the rail for the chair lift is below you. You’re on my skis and all the weight of your legs is on my legs.’ I kept trying to get him off me. I made a mental note that when we came to the top of the chair lift, I was going to ski off to the left as far as I could go.
“So when I got off the lift, I put all my weight on my left ski and I skied off to the left. And I was picking up speed and getting ready to transfer my weight onto both skis. I had a moment of thinking that something didn’t feel right when we got off the chairlift, but I tried to put my right ski down anyway and found out there was no ski there. There was just a boot. When he put his board down diagonally, it had to have popped my right boot out of my binding. So the boot caught in the snow and I did a face plant.”
Lindsay was knocked out by the incident. Over the next few days, she had a sore shoulder. On the return home from the trip, she found that she couldn’t lift her luggage to put in the airplane’s overhead compartment. Once home, she began having trouble sleeping due to the discomfort. She scheduled a visit with the doctor, where an MRI revealed that she had a torn rotator cuff.
She began physical therapy and says she was diligent in her efforts for two months. The injury had not been healing adequately, however, and the surgeon proposed rotator cuff surgery. Due to an international trip for a memorial service that had planned, Lindsay decided to delay the surgery until after the trip was over.
“During that time, my shoulder completely froze in the joint,” she says. “I could do things right after the injury that I could not do days before the surgery. My range of motion was awful.
I could not get a mug out of the kitchen cabinet. I could not get my hand above the height of my shoulder. I could not get clothing off the rail in my closet. I had to start doing everything with my left hand.”
Lindsay reports that the surgery was very successful. “They completely repaired my torn rotator cuff, took some scar tissue off the labrum, and also reattached my bicep. It was very painful as all shoulder surgeries are. Afterward I was sleeping in a recliner and doing physical therapy, but after four weeks of doing PT, I felt like I was almost going backward and I did not feel like I was getting very good attention. I was very frustrated and upset that I was not making any progess at all,” she says.
During this time, Lindsays’ neighbor Mimi came to bring food and check on her. Lindsay remembers crying and sharing her frustration during the visit. Mimi took the opportunity to tell her about her physical therapist, Joy Pfuhl at KCP Physical Therapy.
Lindsay spoke to Joy, set an appointment, and began physical therapy at KCP.
“Good news, bad news,” she says. “I began making some progress, but I was still in tremendous pain. My range of motion was not coming back. Because I was not back to range of motion, I couldn’t start doing weight bearing exercises to get my strength and stamina back.”
For nine months, she traveled between her two homes (in North Carolina and Florida) and worked with KCP in Charlotte and a physical therapist in Florida. She says she was still frustrated with the minimal improvement. Her surgeon continued to push his estimate of her healing timeline. Lindsay says she thought, “No. I can’t do this anymore. I’ve lost sports. I’ve gained about ten pounds. I’d become very inactive – I didn’t even want to walk anymore because of the pain. And don’t even think about sleep. There was no sleep in my life during any of this. I could not lay flat in a bed.
I still was propped up a lot of times, you know, just giving up and going down to the recliner that we had purchased for my recovery time.”
Both physical therapists told Lindsay that they believed that there was something more going on since the physical therapy was not as effective as hoped. She returned to the surgeon to discuss the lack of progress and the options available going forward. She says, “He determined that my frozen shoulder was of such a level that even nine months of post rotator cuff surgery PT was not touching it.”
She returned for a second surgery. “My rotator cuff repair was perfect,” she says. “It was what my body did with the injury. He did a shoulder encapsulation release procedure. He told my husband later that my shoulder was one of the worst he’d ever seen. When I went for my post op checkup, he asked if I had ever been in a total whiteout situation, like trying to drive a car in the snow where everything in front of you is white. He told me that when he went into my shoulder arthroscopically for the second time, it was like being in a white out condition. He said he could not see anything until he finally saw the teal colored stitches that were in my rotator cuff from the repair the previous September. Once he found that, he could orient himself into my joint and just started removing scar tissue.
“While I was still under anesthesia, they moved my arm for the first time in months. The surgeon said, yeah, we got you to about a 95% of your uninjured shoulder range of motion.”
After the surgery came more PT and, according to Lindsay, one of her favorite parts of her KCP relationship story.
The surgery had been offered for the first week of July. Daily physical therapy is needed immediately after surgery, which was causing Lindsay great concern. She wanted to take the opening but felt that she needed to delay due to the physical therapy office being closed four days for the holiday weekend. She told Joy about her scheduling dilemma.
Joy simply told her, “Get the surgery. I’m not traveling, and I live close by. I’ll come meet you.”
“And even though it was a holiday week,” says Lindsay, “she saw me every single day.”
“Daily physical therapy lasted for about two weeks, and then for the next six weeks, I did three times a week. After Labor Day, I dropped down to twice a week. And now after 12 weeks they have me somewhere between 95 and 98 percent. Joy thinks I’m going to be able to get to 100% of my uninjured shoulder. I have very, very few range of motion limitations – just a little bit on my external rotation. Ladies, I can now reach my bra strap with my right hand. It’s not comfortable yet, but I at least can get there! I can get things out of my wall-mounted kitchen cabinets. I can hang my laundry up in my closet. “
“We’d been in North Carolina for a while, so my friends in Florida hadn’t seen me since I could barely lift my arm and was in pain all the time. Now, they can’t believe how much better I’m doing. It’s like a little celebration when they see me. I do my little ballet motion and everywhere I go I get cheers and accolades. So I’m flying high on this!”
“It’s kind of funny, but it’s been life changing,” she says. “It was such a crazy, weird thing that happened. I just think that I was so very fortunate that I had a sympathetic neighbor who was looking out for me and happened to have a personal relationship with KCP. I just grabbed that and it was my lifeline and. And boy, have they been with me through every step of the tremendous struggling months and they have celebrated every gain that I’ve made since that second surgery. It’s been a great experience, great experience.”
“Lindsay had a long and arduous course to get to the finish line,” says Joy. “But no one works harder than Lindsay! She is one determined and disciplined lady. It was a pleasure to be part of her journey to recovery. I’m happy to see her back to doing yoga, playing pickleball, and tennis.”
