The need to be cut

Ineed to be cut. I want to be cut. I just don’t know when I can be cut. have a torn rotator cuff. The rotator cuff is a group of muscles and tendons that help stabilize the shoulder and aid in its movement. Decades of wear from flinging baseballs, footballs and basketballs frayed my right rotator cuff. Fifteen months ago, I tore the cuff pretty much completely when I reached into an airplane’s overheard compartment and felt a searing, crippling pain.

I immediately believed I’d torn my rotator cuff, but it took 13 months of visits to various doctors’ and X-ray offices, and many hours of physical therapy, before an MRI confirmed what I was thought was wrong from the start.

I’ve been in various stages of pain for 15 months. My shoulder always hurts, but the pain becomes more violent, even taking me to my knees at times, when I move my arm horizontally. My shoulder constantly aches when I try to sleep, and I have to move to new positions throughout the night to relieve the throbbing. I only can type briefly before my shoulder starts screaming so much that I have to take a break. My shoulder also deeply hurts when I drive.

My choices are to just deal with this pain and lack of strength and mobility in my shoulder for the rest of my life or get it surgically repaired. I have no fear of surgery, having had two operations on my right hand and two on my life knee. The issue is the surgery will leave me without a functioning right shoulder/arm for four to six weeks.

Fortunately, I’m fairly ambidextrous and already do or can do many things, such as eating, driving, walking the dogs and a bit of handwriting, left-handed. But I can’t type well with one hand and I can’t write well enough with my left hand to grade papers, so I’m trying to find a place in my schedule over the next few months where I can have significant down time.

One of my supervisors at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley offered to have my classes covered and otherwise provide help as needed in any surgery’s wake. But I don’t want to bail in the middle of this semester, which ends in mid-December. Because I certainly don’t want anyone else to teach my classes at the start of the next semester, as I’m territorial about my courses, I would need my shoulder to be marginally functional by next semester’s start in late January.

That means I would have to have the surgery sometime in late December or early January. The issue with that is I usually use that month between semesters — my favorite time of the year anyway, for weather and holiday issues — to do a tremendous amount of my screenwriting work. Some my most creative time, my most cherished time, would have to be sacrificed to this surgery.

Yes, I’ll be able to binge-watch television shows and movies and read novels as I recover. While most people would revel in that, and I do love novels, movies and good TV shows, I can only enjoy such indulgences for a couple of days before I get antsy and seek more engaging activities, including writing this column.

I’ve missed filing a column once since I started writing this weekly column about 27 years ago, and that was when I had a flu for a few weeks I just couldn’t shake. Having this surgery might mean I would miss turning in a column for a few weeks, and I’m sure both of my regular readers would be miffed.

My shoulder, though, is hurting even as I type this.

Yes, I need to be cut. Yes, I want to be cut.

I just have to decide when to be cut.