Chapter 67: Degrees
“The labrum is a rim of cartilage round the edge of the socket,” Jo said. “The socket is very shallow. About a quarter of the ball sits in it.”
“The labrum makes it deeper and gives the capsule something to attach to.
“It's a gasket.”
“Yours tore off the front and bottom edge.
“They put it back with anchors and it healed.”
“So it's fixed.”
“It's repaired.
“That's a different word and I'm going to be careful with it.”
She drew on the back of my sheet, badly, an oval and a line.
“When you repair a shoulder you tighten the front of it. That's how the operation works. You take up the slack.”
“A tight front means you can't rotate out as far. That's your fifty-two degrees against eighty-eight, and it will never be eighty-eight again. That's structural. That's the price of the repair and you paid it at twenty-one.”
“Second thing. Twelve years of not using it.”
“Your rotator cuff on that side is at sixty-three per cent. That is not the surgery. That is a decade of a person quietly not asking her arm to do anything.”
“Can that change?”
“Yes. That's the whole reason I'm going to take your money.”
“Third thing, and this is the one people don't like.”
She turned the paper round.
“There will be some wear in that joint. Almost certainly. Stabilised shoulders get arthritic changes over time and yours has had twelve years and it grinds when you take it overhead.”
“Do I need a scan?”
“You can have one. It costs three hundred pounds privately and it will not change a single thing I tell you to do.”
“Then no.”
“Then no,” she agreed, and wrote something.
Here is the list she gave me, and I have kept the piece of paper.
Things that are gone.
End-range external rotation under load. That is the position an armlock puts you in. It is also the position of a hard sleeve grip when somebody has your arm above your head. That is not coming back, and if I forced it, the front of the joint would eventually go again.
Full weight through an outstretched right arm from height. That is a post to catch yourself on. It is exactly what you must never do in a fall anyway, but a body that is frightened will do it.
Repeated overhead loading.
Not one, not ten.
Repeated.
Competition.
She did not put that on the list. She looked at me instead.
“You are thirty-four with one shoulder at sixty-three per cent and a joint that's already changing. There is no version of this where you compete.”
“I know.”
“Say it back to me, because everybody says they know.”
“I am not going to compete.”
“Good.”
Things that are available.
Everything below shoulder height on that side. All of it. Gripping, pulling, holding, lifting a person's weight in front of me.
“That's most of your sport, isn't it?”
“Most of it is below the shoulder, yes.”
Falling. She said falling was fine, with conditions. She said it carefully.
“A breakfall is a slap with a straight arm at about forty degrees from the body, palm down, and the impact goes up the arm into the shoulder and out through the back.”
“On your left that is nothing. On your right it is a load through a joint that already has wear in it.”
“It'll be sore. Sore is allowed. Sore is information. Sharp is not, and instability is not, and the feeling you had on that table is not.”
“So I can be thrown.”
“You can be thrown by somebody who is not trying to prove anything, on a mat, after twelve weeks of extremely boring work.”
Then she said the sentence I have repeated to myself perhaps two hundred times since.
“You are not made of glass. What will hurt you is not judo. What will hurt you is judo done to prove something.”
She wrote out the programme on two sides of A4 in block capitals and made me read the whole of it back to her in the room.
Three times a week. Twenty minutes. Band external rotations, three sets of fifteen. Prone horizontal abduction with no weight at all for the first fortnight. Prone Y. Wall slides for the shoulder blade. Isometric holds at the end.
“That's it? That's a boring twenty minutes.”
“It is the most boring twenty minutes in medicine and it is the only thing that works.”
At the door she said one more thing, with her hand on the frame.
“You told me you wanted to land. You did not say throw.”
“No.”
“I noticed. I'm not going to ask about it.”
I paid her forty-eight pounds in cash from an envelope and walked home the long way, past the end of Vernon Street. It is a nine-minute detour and I had not intended any of it.