Arm Swinging

A little bit ago, I was standing in the hall talking with my daughter. I had just been doing some arm exercises, and while we were talking, I stood there, rocking back and forth, letting my arm swing to and fro. The name for this exercise is the Codman Pendulum, and it's one of the ones that I've learned at physical therapy. In point of fact, I knew about it before the surgery -- it was something I read about in my hunt for knowledge. I don't understand the physiology of it, but the impression I get is that you want to exercise (and perhaps stretch, if that's accurate) the connecting tissue of the arm/shoulder without actually making the arm support and move itself. Kind of a gentle stress, you might say.

Anyway, there I was, partially hunched over, swinging my arm back and forth while I talked to my daughter. She knew what I was doing, but she still looked at me quizzically. I told her this was my Quasimodo impression, or possibly Igor from the old horror movies. Somehow that segued naturally into a discussion of hand movements, and I told her about the hand movement that black guys used to use in the 60s and 70s, which was called "five on the black hand side". We went through a couple of minutes of white daps, which is the fumbling attempts to be smooth and cool by somebody who is neither, and then she showed me a variation of it, which results in the two people being shoulder to shoulder -- her right shoulder to my left shoulder for example. Kind of interesting.

But the big news is I was able to passively raise my left arm up above my head for the first time. I had hooked up the pulley system over one of the doors. The idea is that my weak arm simply hangs on, while the other arm pulls up and down. Last night, when I did it, I could barely get it up to my shoulder. Today, at work, I was doing the stretches at noontime, and I used my right arm to lift my left -- and I was able to get it almost up to my head. It occurred to me that the exercise might have made me more limber, in a sense, and therefore I tried it tonight. After I did the exercises, I hooked up the pulley, and I gave it a try. I was only able to do it twice, but I did it. I'm pretty pleased.

I'll try this tomorrow, at the actual physical therapy session. And I'll be sure to bring some Advil.