Two months into physical therapy for the injury that wasn’t even caused by doing anything cool
I couldn’t tie my own bathing suit.
We were in Hawaii, and I was standing in front of the mirror in our hotel room trying to reach behind my back to knot a bikini top. And I couldn’t. My left arm couldn’t reach higher than the small of my back. I stood there a minute too long, considering whether I should do the little flip around and tie it from the front, or if I should just ask for help.
I asked for help. To the only person I ask for help. R helped me tie my top, and we were off to the beach. But for someone who was always able to scratch my own back, not being able to simply tie a bathing suit behind my back was troubling.
A few weeks earlier, I had woken up one morning not being able to fully raise my arm. I chalked it up to sleeping on it weird — which happens more than I’d like to admit. Like any other ache that magically appeared overnight, I’d give it a few days, stretch it out, and I’d be good as new(ish).
“A few days” came and went. I was still doing this weird half-shrug to reach the top shelf, still couldn’t get the arm all the way over my head, and I kept living in denial. You know this game if you’ve ever played it: it’s not that bad, it’s fine, I’ll mention it to a doctor eventually, definitely not worth a special appointment, especially without health insurance to pay for it.
A few days became a few weeks, and I felt myself getting more stiff. A few weeks led straight into our trip to Hawaii, and I was so bummed I hadn’t booked a surf lesson. One day, I stood on the beach doing the math — paddle out, pop up, catch a wave, all of it requiring an arm that currently could not reliably reach a bathing suit strap. I made the right call, but it didn’t make me any less sad about it. I was so sad about it that I didn’t even really talk about how sad I was about it, just sat there being fine. Being SO fine. Extremely fine, watching everyone else at Waikiki beach catch waves.
It took another few weeks after we got home before I stopped calling it a sleep thing and made an appointment to see a physical therapist — and only because PTs in the family urged me to. I did some internet research, as I do, and used LLMs to validate, and all those roads led me to either frozen shoulder or bicep tendinitis. The PTs I know couldn’t properly diagnose me through FaceTime without feeling how my shoulder moves. What good is having doctors in the family if I can’t get free medical treatment?!
Anyway.
I met my physical therapist, Celina, and she made me demonstrate my range of motion. I didn’t want to lead the witness, so I didn’t mention a thing about frozen shoulder — only that I couldn’t fully move my shoulder. After talking through it with me, and, yes, feeling what my shoulder was like during movement, there it was: she asked me if I had ever heard of “frozen shoulder”. Well, technically “adhesive capsulitis,” which sounds so much worse somehow. There’s no clear cause. It just happens to you, mostly to women around my age, mostly for no reason anyone can really explain. It is a symptom of perimenopause, so… yay, as if women don’t have enough things to look forward to! And then you spend months trying to undo it. Or you can just leave it alone and it “un-freezes” on its own… but that process can last up to two years. Is that comforting or is that the least comforting thing I’ve ever heard? Not sure.
So that was the day I started physical therapy — or physio, as I’ve learned it’s called in Canada. I thought I would dread it every week, and I kinda do, but not as much as I thought. Celina has a lot to do with that. She’s somewhere in her thirties, funny, easy to talk to — the kind of person you’d want to get a drink with if she weren’t currently gripping your arm like a lever (affectionate). A big chunk of every session now is just her moving my arm for me while I lie there on the table doing nothing, reading the skeletal and muscular poster on the wall, feeling my own limb get pushed somewhere it doesn’t really want to go. All this while she pokes me really hard in the pec muscle. It doesn’t feel nice at all. Another chunk of every session is now dedicated to cupping therapy — she sticks a bunch of suction cups on and around my shoulder and I do some light stretching with them on. They don’t feel very nice either, and they create skin bruises like a mother. But after two months, I’ve gotten used to it. It is a strange thing to get used to, “therapeutic pain”, as she calls it, or someone else’s hands deciding how far your arm goes today. I have spent my whole life being the one who does the reaching.
I’m now about two months into physio, and my range of motion is up about 30 degrees from the day I walked in, which sounds impressive until you remember what my baseline was. It wasn’t very high. I was struggling to move it at all, actually. And I now know what the different muscles in my arm are called and which is which. I learned because I had to tell Celina that the aches are radiating down my deltoid vs. my bicep.
The daily grind of physio is awful. It’s not The Worst, but it’s still stupid. I lovingly refer to my at-home exercises as “these fuckass PT exercises”. I have pages of exercises — pendulum swings, wall walks, elastic band rows, something called “table slide flexion on foam roller”… the list goes on. I do as much as I can / remember to each day, including the one exercise I have fully blocked from memory because I hate it so much. But the doorway stretch has become involuntary. I cannot walk through a doorway anymore without pausing to think “should I stretch now?” and often lean my hand on against the frame and get one rep in. I’ve become a person who stretches in doorways. Ick.
The funny thing is: I think I’d actually be in less pain right now if I’d just left it alone. Left frozen, my shoulder wouldn’t ache the way it does most days now. It would just be stuck. Unbothered in its little frozen state. The work of unfreezing it is what hurts. Progress, in this case, feels almost exactly like the thing it’s supposed to be fixing — which feels a little too on the nose for a year that was supposed to be about resting, not pushing through pain to get somewhere. Apparently my stupid shoulder didn’t get that memo.
I’m impatient about it. Two months a weekly physio appointment and these fuckass exercises, on top of however many weeks of the frozenness just existing before that, and the arm still won’t reach behind my back the way it needs to. Thankfully I have a set of bras that just go over my head like a sports bra, with no clasp required. I don’t have a timeline for when I’ll get my full range of motion back. Celina doesn’t really give me one either. She even told me that we’ll do all we can, but there is a chance my body will just stay angry anyway. Great. Reassuring. But I need to try, because being stuck (and an even worse kind of stuck) for two years is unacceptable.
I know I could end this with a tidy little bow — 30 degrees became 60, 60 became full range, the moral of the story is patience. I think the moral of the story is still patience and annoyingly hard work, but I don’t know yet if it will pay off.
What I do know for sure is that I have a shoulder that is very slowly getting better, and is not getting worse (yay!), but one that hurts most days in a way that means something is actually happening in there.
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