How not to fall off your bike...
Jan. 14th, 2017 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylMy parents have had an eventful week. Leading a ride for his cycle group, my dad was going round a right-hand bend when he discovered a car in his path. Swerving to avoid it, he hit the kerb, came off his bike, and collided with a tree. His helmet took the brunt of the impact but he seems to have hit his shoulder going down. His bike had survived unscathed, so he hopped back on and finished the ride. Despite a slightly tender shoulder, he went another ride with no apparent ill-effects.
Then, late at night, he was woken by a pain in his now-very-tender shoulder. My mum was a loss for what do when sudden the shoulder popped and the pain went away; clearly he'd managed to dislocate it while he was asleep and managed to put it back into place after waking up. The next morning, they went to A&E where X-rays revealed that he'd sheered off part of his glenoid cavity — the socket that joins the humerus to the scapula — in the accident, presumably triggering the later dislocation.
The consultant who examined him has decided on an extremely conservative wait-and-see course of treatment: he has to keep his arm in a sling, avoiding any activities like cycling that might jostle his shoulder, and they will check in two weeks to see how it is progressing. They told him that if he'd been younger and didn't have complicating medical conditions, they'd've considered surgery; but in his case it just wasn't worth the risk...
Then, late at night, he was woken by a pain in his now-very-tender shoulder. My mum was a loss for what do when sudden the shoulder popped and the pain went away; clearly he'd managed to dislocate it while he was asleep and managed to put it back into place after waking up. The next morning, they went to A&E where X-rays revealed that he'd sheered off part of his glenoid cavity — the socket that joins the humerus to the scapula — in the accident, presumably triggering the later dislocation.
The consultant who examined him has decided on an extremely conservative wait-and-see course of treatment: he has to keep his arm in a sling, avoiding any activities like cycling that might jostle his shoulder, and they will check in two weeks to see how it is progressing. They told him that if he'd been younger and didn't have complicating medical conditions, they'd've considered surgery; but in his case it just wasn't worth the risk...
