Dinner with Beards and Rotator Cuff pics

Last night I met Joelle Beard and her parents and friend.  We talked for about two hours at the Kneaders in Ogden.  It was a lot of fun.  She really went into her swim without an extensive knowledge base of what was involved and a lot of the nitty gritty details.  But she made it work.  It goes to show that swimming the channel is not an exact science.  There are best practices, and then there's just swimming and dealing with whatever comes your way.  She did alot of training on her own. 

I found out she did her qualifier in Bear Lake by doing a double width.  So she is the first one to do that, not me!  I'm gonna have to get her to look up what her time was exactly and we'll log that.



Here's the tear.  The rotator cuff is in bottom right and top left.
That should all be together and you can see that it's torn away
and split.



This morning I met with Dr. Gardiner.  My shoulder is healing nicely.  The sutures are dissolvable and he said I could take the tape of  now.  Gladly! 

Here's some pics he took and shared with me.

He said I need to wear the sling for the next three weeks pretty much full time until we meet next.  He did say that if I really wanted to, I could occasionally take it off to type as long as I keep my arm bent and don't rotate it outwards.  It should remain in the same position as if it were in the sling.



Here's the tear just before he ties it all up. 



He gave me a couple of stretches to work on for the next few week.  Simple arm curls and straight arm rotations with my arm pointing straight down.  Easy Peezy.   Pain is good.  I'm off the meds and had my first night without ice.  Not too fun, but OK.  I'm looking forward to the therapy and then getting back into a routine. 

Looking forward to the Global Open Water Conference tomorrow night.  Going with Josh and Goody and get to meet alot of new people and hear some really inspiring stories.  I can't wait!

I sure hope he got his pioneering merit badge.  Are these
grannies or square knots?