Soccer & Surgery

Tanner made the Varsity soccer team this year and was thrilled!!  He really loves playing soccer and is quite a good player.  Unfortunately his shoulder was not doing very well.  It kept hurting and popping out.  We were finally able to get him in to see a surgeon and to have an MRI.  The results showed that he had a torn labrum and needed to have surgery.  We let him choose when to do the surgery because he would have to miss a sport no matter what.  He decided to do the surgery as soon as he could.  I told him he could wait until after the season, but he told me that he hurt everyday.  I knew that it must be bad if he was wanting to do it during the soccer season.  I guess there really is no good time to have a surgery.  If he had waited he would've missed club soccer and so on with the next sport and the next.  So, we scheduled the surgery and he played in a few games and he played hard!

Here he is pre-surgery.  Still smiling.  The surgery went really well.  The tear was actually worse than what they thought.  The labrum was torn all the way around.  So, they fixed the tear and then put 7 anchors into the bone to hold it in place.  He was pretty funny coming out of surgery.  We tried to take pictures but the nurse made us put the camera away.  The first few days to a week were pretty tough.  Lots of pain.   A lot of people have told us that shoulder surgery is a rough recovery.  He was in an immoblizing sling for 6 weeks.  He did really well with the sling and had to learn to do things left-handed and got pretty good at it.  He stayed home from school for 2 weeks, then we had spring break, so he was able to rest for 3 weeks before going back to school.  I was nervous to have him go and be around everyone, but it went really well.  He was so happy to have the sling come off!  Now he's doing physical therapy 3 times a week and the therapist is very happy with his progress.  He said he's ahead of the game which is what we like to hear!  Hopefully things will continue to go well and he will be back to doing everything he loves.  It's been a long hard road, but he's doing great and I'm so proud of the way he's handled everything!