Douglas Prentice

The moment it turned real was a car park, not a clinic. I reached up to close the boot with my right arm and the shoulder simply would not go, and a grinding pain ran down to my elbow that no painkiller had touched in months. I had been sleeping upright in an armchair to get any rest at all. A week later a surgeon put my scan on the screen and pointed at a joint that had ground itself smooth, with a rotator cuff that was long past repairing.

What floored me was how little plain information there was for the decision in front of me. Clinic pages promised a “new lease of life”; forums swung between people back on the golf course and people who wished they had never bothered. Nobody explained the parts I actually needed: why my ruined cuff meant a reverse replacement rather than a standard total, what the deltoid muscle would now be doing for my arm, how many weeks I would live one-handed in a sling, and how long the whole thing would last before it might need doing again.

Capital Health Summit is the account I put together afterwards, working outward from my own reverse shoulder replacement, with a consultant shoulder surgeon who keeps every clinical claim honest. The surgeon’s side of this is not mine to give. What I can describe is how strange the first sling weeks feel, and the morning I reached a high shelf without thinking. The mechanics of the joint, and whether I have got them right on the page, are read over by a shoulder surgeon before any of it is published.