When Shoulder Pain Pumps Cause Pain

Hopkins, MIYou think you know the drill—you're going in for shoulder surgery, you'll get a shoulder pain pump, you'll take a little while to recover and then, finally, your shoulder will be all better. Except that it's not all better. For some reason, you've noticed a strange clicking and grinding in your shoulder. You assume that this is a side effect of your surgery and that it will resolve itself in time.

But it doesn't. Instead, the clicking and grinding get worse. You find your arm is getting weaker instead of stronger. You notice you can't quite move the shoulder, or the arm, in the same way you once could. Every once in a while your shoulder just refuses to move past a certain point or your arm won't move past chest height. And then you notice that even simple tasks are causing you pain: brushing your teeth or your hair, for example, become monumentally painful activities, if they are possible at all.

You notice you cannot lie down on the side that the surgery took place any more and it is harder for you to sleep at night. You no longer feel properly rested when you wake up. Your employment activities are almost impossible to complete and you find you have to look for other work—that is, if you can work at all. You become worried about moving the shoulder at all, concerned about the grinding noise it makes. Eventually, you have to relearn how to perform many activities because you can no longer do them with that arm.

Unfortunately, you have children (or grandchildren) but you cannot pick them up at all and cannot play games with them. You have to rely on someone else to carry things for you, because the arm cannot hold anything over 5 lbs. You start to worry about where this will all end, or if it will at all. It no longer seems like a normal side effect of surgery—rather, it seems that something has gone horribly wrong. You start to think you may never get better.

Of course, along with those thoughts can come depression. After all, you cannot perform the tasks you once performed with ease. Your life has changed dramatically following the surgery that was supposed to help you. You have trouble finding work because even the least physical of jobs still requires an ability to use your arm. Think about it—typing requires arm motion (not to mention an ability to sit upright for long periods of time), cooking definitely requires arm movement, answering phones even requires some arm movement. Virtually any job that can be named requires a person to be able to move his or her arms without immense pain.

You may have been fairly active before, as well. Now, you can't throw a ball, can't lift weights with that arm and can't play most sports. Even walking your dog becomes a problem because the dog's leash puts pressure on that arm, causing you pain.

So, what can you do? Well, you can go to your doctor and discuss the possibility that a shoulder pain pump may have caused your shoulder problems. That probably won't help with your immediate predicament, but at least you may have some answers about what has caused all this pain. Then, you can talk to a lawyer about what your legal options are, because you may be able to join a lawsuit against the makers of the shoulder pain pump.