Took a little mild ukemi today, worked with the jo and threw with my right arm. 

Left shoulder burned a bit, biceps tendon complaining hotly down my arm. I figure it's an inflammation of the sheath of the tendon from the swelling on my shoulder, and have gone back to my ice pack for tonight. 

Down to one naproxen sodium today, Voltaren cream and ice. Using rubber tubing for exercises to strengthen the rotator cuff and brace cartilage now MIA. 

I'm quite functional, working is no longer uncomfortable and budo is becoming less so. I still like to keep my left hand in a jeans pocket rather than let it hang, and with this injury it may become a habit. 

I'm weighing what CG has told me for years, about the practicality of shoulder rolls, and wish I didn't have to understand what he's talking about, this way. 

I don't think I get another chance with this shoulder, and I'm not likely to take any. 

It's like stepping out of a photo negative.
I know, we don't see them so often any more, life is digital. My life is certainly digital, and I'm OK with that. But I remember life in photo negatives. The first photos of my early life, were in black and white.

Now that you know you're reading the diary of a Mature Person, maybe what I'm about to write about seems crazy.
Maybe someday, the idea that money was green and white, will seem crazy too. The Euro is much prettier in any case. If pretty equals worth, that explains a lot. Doesn't help me much ;-) .

I was doing martial arts (aikido), fell wrong, and ripped the top ligament which holds the collarbone down to the shoulder, right off. Now I have a lot of cartilage floating around and a shoulder which droops oddly beyond the slightly elevated shelf of the collarbone. I'll get a pic up here soon enough. One bit is too far up, the other too far down.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to feel more recovering, than injured. There's no surgical answer, the shoulder is too mobile a joint for surgeons to be happy with their limited options for repair. It wasn't recommended for me, and I was left to do my own physical therapy.
A friend gave us some tied-off color coded surgical tubing for Chuck's hip rehab, and I have adopted it for my shoulder rehab. Sitting on a physioball today, doing my 15 reps of 3 different angles, toning the supraspinatus up for its new job of holding my shoulder together, in the absence of the cartilage whose job it was, before.

I am also using "medicine balls" for simple range of movement, such as I would use in working.
Using the surgical tubing to build strength in the directions I am currently weak.

Gently, slowly, irrevocably.

I've never been one to take "no" for an answer, and I'm not about to start now.

I'll consider myself healed, when I can do kata without limitation, or make a basket without a hitch.
Not that I like basketball, just that throwing things up, right now, is not comfortable.

I'm not going to try aikido again, nor shoulder rolls. It's just not worth it, any more.
I prefer to have my shoulder to work, to do weapons kata, and daily life.