Life on the far side… (shoulder drama)

… of 25 years of age. Up till now it’s been quite exciting.

I’m currently moving out of my apartment in munich, to move to Lausanne, Switzerland, in a few days (I’ll be doing a term abroad there, including the exciting opportunity of doing a project with Wulfram Gerstner of the Laboratory of computational Neuroscience – sounds good huh? Hope this really will be as good) which incedentally is why it’s a hell of a mess there right now. 5 days to go of packing stuff and driving it back to my parents’. I’m quite looking forward to the term, also learning french while being there will be quite a challenge – still there’s a lot I will greatly miss being 500km away from Munich.

Now then to the worse parts of being 25:

Yesterday I finally went to see a shoulder specialist, to check out my ever hurting and strange feeling shoulder. I had surgery done when I was 15 to fix a dislocation I suffered while skateboarding. It’s been ok since then, I only had some uncomfortable feeling most of the time, and sometimes it started hurting for a few days once I really got into sports (climbing, kendo) or sleeping on it in a wrong position. But nothing alltoo bad really.

Well, now this doctor takes an x-ray, looks at it, hits the table with his fist, turns around to me and says:

“I don’t know how to say this, but if you’re lucky, you might be able to get compensation from the guy who performed the surgery back then. It looks like its badly messed up.”

What the? I really didn’t see that coming. He sent me to get a CT, where the doc upon looking at my pictures (picture to the left) exclaims:

“I first thought this to be the shoulder of a 75 year old. You have severe arthrosis in your shoulder, and also on of the anchors [set in to fix my shoulder back in 1998] peeks out INTO THE JOINT which it absolutely shouldn’t. You’ll have to fix this soon, otherwise it will only get worse.”

She also told me it probably won’t get better from here, fixing it now will at best ensure it not getting worse. FUCK THAT. I had about a year after my first surgery before I could use my arm properly again, also it’s the right side so goodbye writing, and I don’t want to go through all this again. But thinking about not being able to use my shoulder properly AT ALL come 10 years does change my perspective a bit. I’ll have to see what kind of treatment my specialist will recommend in a week from now when I have my next appointment.

I might just NOT get it fixed, and keep up sports as much as I do right now, and you’ll see me running around as depicted to the right in a few years. This was right after my birthday-dinner in Erding with my family, walking home my dad’s terrible 80s jacket and my grandma’s rollator (=walking frame). I was badly beaten up by a gang of Erding’s worst on my way home for walking around like this. Not really. But it could have happened.

Wish me luck boys and girls, this shoulder’s gotta get better.



One Comment

  1. naabster wrote on July 28, 2008 at 12:47 #

    Oh shit. sue that motherfucker to hell!