Swimming update
In mid January, I started experiencing some pain in my left shoulder during swimming. It might have been even earlier than that, because I remember making a conscience effort to roll my body more, and focusing more on balancing my stroke. At the end of January was the cruise, so there was no swimming for a week, and after some discomfort lifting the first day, lifting was cut out of the daily cruise workout.
After returning from the cruise, I swam a few days and by Friday my shoulder was actually grinding. Typically, this is caused by fatigue in the small muscles in the shoulder, whose jobs are to make sure everything is moving correctly. When these muscle fatigue, your stroke recovery (the above water part of the stroke) lacks the quality that it should. This in turn puts stress on the ligiments and tendons in the shoulder, which rub the wrong way and become inflamed. Very common in swimmers, and is referred to as swimmer’s shoulder.
The solution to swimmers sholder is to rest the shoulder to allow everything the time it needs to return to normal, exercise those small muscles in the shoulder with stretch cords or light weights, and when you get back into the water, make sure that you are doing your stroke correctly. Swimming is the stimulus for the inflamation, and once swimming is stopped, inflamation should go away after a few days and the pain that goes along with it.
My last practice was February 11th and it is now March 3rd. March 1st, while sitting at my desk, I experienced shooting pain down my left arm. Two and a half weeks is enough for the pain to go away, and it seemed to have increased. Time to go see a doctor. I schedule an appointment on the 2nd for the 3rd, after much research if I can skip from a general practitioner straight to a shoulder specialist.
PPO says, step one, general practicitioner. Brook has a doctor that she likes, so at least I have a reference. This guy is a good family doctor. Very personable, didn’t try to talk over my head, explained everything and has also had shoulder problems. I do believe that his should specific knowledge was limited to what he had experience personally, but he is a doctor, and he wasn’t an idiot, so he knew the steps that needed to be taken. Those steps didn’t answer my question, but that wasn’t all that surprising.
I did have a shoulder x-ray, and the doctor told me ahead of time it wasn’t going to tell us much. It did rule out some unlikely, but very serious posibilities. All my bones are nice and smooth looking and there were no scary bright or dark spots where there shouldn’t have been.
Two weeks of additional rest with a prescription of super aleve was the result of my doctors trip. If that doesn’t work, he is either going to do an MRI or send me to a orthopedic surgeon. It takes 7 to 10 days for a typical referral, so if I am not better in two weeks, it will be another week or two before I see a specialist.
It doesn’t look like I am going to be swimming any time soon.