United Brachial Plexus Network, Inc.

Hello all,

I will be having neurolysis surgery on July 30th. My BPI is due to a total shoulder replacement I had last summer. All nerves have recovered except for the ones directly responsible for shoulder movement...as for that, I have none. My deltoid is horribly atrophied as well as the muscles in my upper back. Because of that, my shoulder subluxes constantly throughout the day.

I am hoping this surgery allows me to use my "new shoulder" as that is why I had the surgery in the first place. I am relatively young (46) and very active, though I've been relagated to "the sidelines" since the BPI.

My doctors are very hopeful and if I could just get passed the extreme anxiety, I might be, too. I think I'm worried too much about them not being able to fix the problem...instead of being confident that they will. Maybe as the surgery gets a little closer, I'll start feeling better about it, but right now, I'm a mess.

Thanks for listening,

MB

My husband had surgery in March to try to recover his deltoid too. For him, they moved a nerve from his tricep into his deltoid. Of course, we're only 3 months in so we don't know the result, but we're hopeful. I think the anticipation of the surgery is worse than surgery itself (of course, I'm not the one that had the surgery). In that regard, I feel lucky that we found out he needed surgery on a Tuesday and he had it that Friday so we didn't have much time to stress over it. Naturally, there is pain involved, though for my husband I think the effects of coming out of anethstetia were worse than the pain- and that was short lived. He took heavy narcotics the night of surgery and we got on a plane the next morning to fly home and he was on nothing more than tylenol. Best of luck to you, the waiting is hard.