As someone who loves playing tennis, I’m generally used to seeing the players around me get injured during both training and tournaments. Most of the people I play with are over the age of 65, so they’re at retirement age and tennis is more of a hobby. However, I recently injured my shoulder, too. It hurt so much when I injured my shoulder that I had to stop playing immediately because my tennis racquet basically fell out of my hand. When it first happened, I did try to stop it from getting worse by doing smaller treatments like heat packs and letting it rest a lot more than usual. But the shoulder injury only got worse. I decided it was time to do something about it.
Last week I went to see a shoulder injury specialist. Melbourne has a number of these to choose from, but I ended up going to one near me because I was concerned that if I spent too much time in the car then I might injure my shoulder more. When I arrived at the offices, I was greeted by the receptionist, who had me sit in a waiting room for a few minutes before being called into another room by the specialist.
We discussed my symptoms, which included the pain I had been experiencing in my upper arm, how my biceps kept cramping, and how it hurt to rotate my shoulder. The specialist understood how annoying it must be to not be able to play tennis, which was my favourite hobby.
After running a number of tests the specialist also said that I seemed to have injured my biceps by swinging the racquet around too hard, and that I would probably need a procedure called biceps tenodesis. She checked how severe the tear was by manipulating the joints through a few practice movements on my arm. She raised her eyebrow at me, which I took to mean that it must have been relatively bad. After the surgery, it’s going to take me several weeks to recover and I’ll have to wear a sling. I just can’t wait to get back onto the court and start playing tennis again!