Dr. called today with results from MRI I had on Monday. Says I have a partial distal bicep tendon tear (bicep to elbow). A little bit of googling jives with what he says...that it needs surgery if i want it to be close to normal. He says 6 weeks to recover but things ive read online say 3-4 months for total recovery.
It's the right arm and wouldn't you know, I'm just finishing up a auto to manual trans swap in the 12 car. LOL
If you've had this surgery, how did it go for you?
Get it done soon. My father tore his and then let months pass before surgery. His arm now has just a fraction of the strength it should have and will never recover.
I had similar surgery done a number of years ago. Left arm made a SNAP sound as I was carrying a 32" CRT TV out of an apartment. I didn't drop the TV on the tile floor but it hit the ground just outside the door,lol.
I sat in my truck thinking about my pour choices for about 20 minutes. It didn't really hurt too bad, I even turned down pain killers at the doctor. They looked at me like I was an alien, "pain management" doctors were a big problem in my area for years, aka pill mills.
Ortho looked at it, told me I would have about 15% of my strength in that arm if I didn't want to fix it. Yea, fix it.
It was a few months before is was close to normal, I had a bump of scar tissue for about 9 months IIRC. It slowly got smaller and now I just have a faint scar on my forearm right below the crease of my elbow.
Doc described drilling a hole through the bone, pulling the tendon through it, install a clamp of some kind and let the bone grow back around it.
The arm works as good as it ever did. I'm just careful of what I attempt to lift.
my dad tore his proximal (at shoulder) at age 60, got surgery within a few days, did the PT, it worked great for the rest of his life.
My FIL tore a bicep muscle in both his left and right arm at different times before I knew him and never got it fixed. Must have been the smaller muscle as he still has a good amount of strength. He's... stubborn.
had an acquaintance tear his by showing off and lifting a regulation pool table. 6months later after surgery, he's still not back to normal lifting
I tore mine (100% tear/rupture) when I tore my shoulder labrum, then thr surgery was postponed 18 months because the imaging was a dud and we tried to rehab it. They didn't know until they were inside that the bicep tendon rupture was even a thing. The atrophy, when combined with the labrum, that was a 310 tear, which they had thought was about a 180 tear, but a torn portion had "flipped" making a sort of reflection in the imaging because the first imaging that had shown the labrum tear didn't use contrast.
It's not the way to do things. My recovery from a compound fib/tib, ACL, MCL, PCL, Achilles in addition to 13 breaks in my left foot has been more complete (and that was 6 surgeries and 10 months in a chair before getting up on crunches.) I have maybe 35% strength in my right arm. Get it taken care of without delay.
I know my TV story isn't as good as Lou Ferrigno's reason for rupturing his bicep.
gsettle, How did you hurt yours?
jgrewe said:I know my TV story isn't as good as Lou Ferrigno's reason for rupturing his bicep.
gsettle, How did you hurt yours?
Funny you should ask because like Lou Ferrigno, I was helping one of my kids. He was moving from Miami back to Indiana and the his mom and I went down to help load the Uhaul and ...well you can figure it from here lol.
Thanks to all for the replies. I think I know what I need to do now. Just need to figure out when...
In reply to gsettle :
I wrecked my right shoulder at work a while back: labrum, rotator cuff and torn bicep (proximal not distal). This was late pandemic, so it took a while before they could do the surgery because they were just starting to catch up on the backlog.
I had my surgery in mid November. In addition a bunch of other work, they relocated and reattached part of my bicep. I have a couple of new Kevlar anchors up there now.
I was expecting to roll right into physical therapy the following day like they do with knee and hip replacements. Nope. I was told that I couldn't lift anything heavier than a can of tomato paste (6 oz.) for eight weeks. It was the bicep repair that was the biggest concern, as they feared that it would detach again with any strain, and I'd need to go back in for more surgery. Basically, you need to lay down some new bone over the anchors in order to secure them in place. That takes some time.
I started PT at about ten weeks, and continued that for about seven months. I was using the little pastel colored weights for most of that. It took a really long time to regain my strength and range of motion, but the stronger I got, the faster I got strong. It was scary for a while, because it seemed to take forever and I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to go back to work, but eventually I got there.
It was a lot of hard work, but I needed to get it done. Totally worth getting it fixed though. Pain was tolerable with just the ice machine through most of it.
Well, TT it fixed on Tuesday. Not sure if I'll ever be able to turn a screwdriver again lol. Pronate/supinate is very difficult right now.
gsettle said:Well, TT it fixed on Tuesday. Not sure if I'll ever be able to turn a screwdriver again lol. Pronate/supinate is very difficult right now.
Sounds like you'll have to buy some new power tools! Good luck with recovery.
Give it time. I don't even think about range of motion on mine anymore.
jgrewe said:Give it time. I don't even think about range of motion on mine anymore.
Good to know...About how long did that take?
AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:gsettle said:Well, TT it fixed on Tuesday. Not sure if I'll ever be able to turn a screwdriver again lol. Pronate/supinate is very difficult right now.
Sounds like you'll have to buy some new power tools! Good luck with recovery.
Great idea! Thanks for the well wishes!
In reply to gsettle :
I don't remember exactly. The scar tissue took at least 6 months to go not get in the way anymore. It was like having a walnut in the bend of my elbow that kept me from folding my arm all the way. After that, I was more concerned about stressing it too much than dexterity issues.
Right now I don't even think about it. That is probably a bad thing because I might do something stupid. I can still carry a sheet of drywall or 3/4" plywood with it.
I...
I didn't know that was a thing.
Sorry to hear that, man, that's nuts. I'm glad for modern medicine and glad they were able to get you on the road to progress.
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