About me

Hi, my name is Nick Cresswell, I am a 38 year old male from London, England.

For ten years I regularly enjoyed the sport of Hang Gliding. This was until I disclocated my shoulder in an aborted aerotow launch in July 2009. I haven't flown again since then as I have been recovering from the injury. A little over two years spent out of the sport due to one human-error induced crash!

You can watch a video of one of my successful flights here

I thought I'd blog about my recent tenodesis surgery as I could find very little information about tenodesis recovery online. For the sake of context here is how I got to need a tenodesis.

My sholder dislocation was sustained with a little forward speed (20mph or so). You could liken it to coming off a motorcycle or mountain bike. This means trauma and shoulder trauma means tearing something.

I suffered an avulsion fracture which is where tendon gets pulled from the bone, but instead of the tendon tearing, the bone that anchors the tendon comes away. This can heal on it's own which it did in my case, but the healing resulted in a change to the smooth shape of the humerous (upper arm bone) which caused catching and rubbing of the sub-acromial bursa.

I had sub-acromial decompression in May 2010 which relieved the catching and rubbing, but not all of the pain went away. Inspite of a disciplined and rigorous physio program, I could not shake the chronic pain in the front and back of my shoulder.

An ultrasound exam in Jan 2011 showed I had an subluxing long-head biceps tendon, where the bicep tendon was moving around in the bicepital groove. This would explain the pain in the front of the shoulder.

The pain in the back of the shoulder had to be caused by something too - figured it was the avulsion injury. You may wonder why this pathology was not spotted by the surgeon who performed the subacromia decompression and so do I. Needless to say I sought the help of another surgeon.

Winding forward to August 2011, I write this post a day after my most recent surgery. This was an investigative procedure to find the cause of the pain. The surgeon discovered that my avulsion injury had progressed to a near full thickness tear of the rotator cuff and my biceps tendon was also torn. Both of these are now resolved with a rotator cuff repair and biceps tenodesis respectively.

For those who are interested, the tenodesis did not involve an inteference screw but was done using a suture technique.

Read my next post where I tell you what the pain is like!