Well, I am the lucky guy that is married to Allie and seeing how she has a bad wing and all, I thought that maybe I should pinch hit for her and update her blog.  

First of all, Allie is very grateful for all of you that have taken the time to post words of encouragement to her on this blog.  She reads all of your comments and it means a great deal to her.  She considers herself very blessed to have good people like yourselves that follow her blog.

What has Allie been up to?  you might ask.  Well... 

For those of you that don't know, Allie's shoulder was in pretty bad shape.  It was bad enough that it would just fall out of joint from time to time.  It had done this for years, but it was starting to interfere with her quality of life and more importantly, her longarm quilting. Obviously, it had to be fixed.

Those of you that know Allie personally, know that she has what some might call an addiction....... to Coke.  Not being able to drink a Coke beverage from midnight, until after her surgery was quite a task for her.  When she was in the recovery room, and started to wake up from all of the wonderful drugs they had pumped into her system, the first thing she asked for was a Coke.  Still not quite awake she took her first sip, looked up at me and said, "ahhh, a Coke and a smile."  She, of course, was smiling. 


She felt ready to go home about 2 hours after surgery, but they would not release her due to her heart rate being too high.  (Probably the sugar rush from the Coke.....just sayin')  I was finally able to take her home a little over 8 hours after first checking into the surgical center.

The Doc was happy with the result of the surgery, however, the injury to Allie's shoulder was not what he had expected.  He had originally thought that the looseness in her shoulder was a result of her tendons being torn away from the bone on either the front or back of her shoulder.  He had anticipated going in and reattaching the tissue to the bone.  What he found was that the tissue had become extremely stretched out all of the way around her shoulder. He described it to me as having a 34 inch waste and wearing a pair of 42 inch pants.  So instead of having to reattach tissue to bone, he had to go in and "pleat" her tendons to tighten them.

What this means for Allie is that her recovery is going to take longer than we thought.  We had planned on starting therapy 2-3 weeks after surgery, but it will be more like 6 weeks.  Therapy is going to take quite a while once she starts, and considering she is right handed and it was her right shoulder, it will be some time before she is back to normal and able to sew again.  


Having said that, she is getting better every day and is anxious to get back to creating.  


Keep checking in.  She'll be back........sometime.


-Tony