Ouch.

My shoulder was basically rebuilt. The joint capsule was lax, the ligaments were loose and there was plenty of scar tissue to go around. Dr. Evans said that my shoulder easily dislocated once I was under anesthesia. Essentially, what was happening was that my shoulder was frequently trying to dislocate, and all of this movement was creating further instability, generating scar tissue, and encouraging frequent inflammation. The good news is that it's all basically fixed. My ligaments are tucked and stitched, my scar tissue is cleaned up, and I had some osteoplasty (bone cutting) on a part of the shoulder (acromion) that was causing a little bit of impingement on my rotator cuff.

The bad news is the recovery time--probably about 4 to 6 months to be back 100-percent.

I'm stuck in the sling for the next 3-4 weeks, then I have 4 weeks of range of motion physical therapy, then 4 weeks of basic strengthening exercises, then 4 weeks of functional strengthening. I still probably won't have sign off for any real mountain biking for a little while after that due to the risk of an "over the bars" crash knocking me back to square one.

Looks like the VT 50 might be my only mtb race for the year--but I'll be running as soon as I can.

I'm okay with this right now---the weather's still crappy, the trails are a mess, and there aren't many races and rides going on. By mid-May, I'll need sedation.

One of the first things that had to be done was that my ligaments needed to be tightened up. These next two pics show some of the stitches that are holding them together:

Then, some of the soft tissue that makes up the joint capsule had to be taken care of. They used a tiny tool that was essentially a mini heat-shrink gun that shrank the soft tissue:

That's about it. There's lots of photos, but unless you know what you are looking at (look--there's the superior glenohumero ligament), there's really not much to look at. This one is kind of nasty looking though...