I've had two followup appointments since getting surgery five weeks ago to repair my broken clavicle. Things are going well; I stopped wearing a sling many weeks ago, and have a nearly full range of motion. But I do mean something very narrow by that: I can rotate the shoulder joint to just about any position that I could before the break, but for part of that range I don't have any speed or strength. I would guess this is partly because of remaining tissue damage around the clavicle and the AC joint, and partly because the muscles have atrophied from limited use. The broken ribs are also much better; I can now sneeze with minimal pain. So I look pretty normal but I'm not quite all right.

I'm now cleared for cycling and swimming, but the bone is not completely healed and I still can't move heavy things with my left arm, or weight train, or things like that. I took my old bicycle in to the bike store, and they confirmed that the frame is bent. It's therefore a writeoff, because straightening it would both be very expensive and would compromise the strength. Between the bicycle and what I was wearing, almost the only things that can be salvaged are my special cycling sandals and the pedals they clip on to. My helmet was shattered, gloves ripped, glasses scratched, shirt cut off of me (and threads of it picked out of my skin), and shorts shredded. I think the bicycle computer can be salvaged, too, and the panniers and their contents were fine. I have ordered another bicycle, the current version of the same model. Meanwhile, my next checkup in six weeks. Here's what the clavicle looked like last Monday:

I asked the doctors about the pain that I still get when I do shrugging motions, like hiking up my pants. "Oh, yes, well the trapezius connects to the clavicle—you know the trapezius?—and we had to cut a few millimeters off to work with the break. So that's going to hurt until it heals. But it's really tiny, just a few millimeters." "I see. Did you cut any other muscles off the bone?" "Well, there's the deltoid ... no, we didn't cut that, and the pectoral ... we didn't cut that ... no, just the trapezius" with big smile.

Okay, not a big deal, but I did specifically ask before deciding on surgery if they would cut any muscles. I wouldn't have changed my mind because of this, or because of the skin numbness below the incision that they also forgot to mention, but the fewer surprises after surgery, the better. And this is with a team of two very bright, very helpful and informative surgeons, who were asked a direct question about this very topic. Thus I'm not at all surprised by research on modern medicine that shows, for example, that "a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections ... saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million."