Years down the line, how would I actually KNOW my replacement is failing, and what does a revision involve?

Not a panic post, more a thing I have started chewing on now that mine is settled and quiet and I have stopped thinking about it daily.

Everyone on here, me included, spends all their energy on the run up to the operation and the first six months. Nobody talks about year eight or year fifteen. My replacement is doing exactly what I wanted, I sleep flat, I can hang washing, brilliant. But it is not going to be brilliant forever, is it, and I have no idea what the warning signs would even be. Would it hurt again? Would it feel loose? Would it just gradually stop working and I would put it down to getting older, which honestly sounds like exactly what I would do.

And the bit I really want to know, if it ever does go, what is the redo actually like? Is it the same operation again or is it a much bigger deal? Nobody at my follow up brought any of this up and I did not think to ask while I was busy being pleased with myself.

Good question and one I have never seen asked here. I asked something near it at my pre op, mostly out of nosiness, and all I got was that it can be revised if it ever comes to that. Which is reassuring in a vague way and useless as an actual answer.

My understanding from the reading I did before mine is that new pain in a shoulder that had gone quiet is the flag people are told to take seriously, rather than stiffness that has always been there. The stiffness I have is just my normal now, three years in, and nobody is worried about it. It is change that matters, not the baseline.

What I cannot answer is your redo question. I have a reverse and I was told a reverse is already what they use when other things have failed, which made me wonder what is left after that. Would like to hear the proper version too.

Both halves of this deserve a straight answer, so I will take them in turn.

On knowing: the things that should prompt a review are change rather than the state you have settled into. New pain in a replacement that had become comfortable, movement you had and have now lost, a sense of the joint slipping or giving way, and any redness, fever, swelling or discharge from the old wound area. The last group is urgent rather than a wait and see, because a deep infection is one of the routes to failure and it can appear at any point after the operation, not only early. Gradual stiffness that has been with you since the first year, by contrast, is usually just your shoulder, and you are right that people tend to attribute genuine new symptoms to ageing. If in doubt, be seen and imaged, since a plain X ray answers a lot of this quickly.

On how likely: for most people this never becomes relevant. Pooled registry and study figures put shoulder replacements at around 90 percent still in place at 10 years, and beyond that the chance of needing a revision runs at roughly 1 percent a year, so the risk accumulates slowly rather than arriving on a due date. On what a revision is: it means removing some or all of the original components, putting in new ones, sometimes of a different type, and dealing with whatever caused the failure. It is a bigger and more demanding operation than the first, because there is less bone to work with and more scarring, and the results are usually good for pain but less predictable for reach and strength. To reverse-at-68's point, a failed anatomic total or a failed partial is often converted to a reverse precisely because a reverse does not need a working cuff. A reverse that fails is harder, and is where the planning gets genuinely specialised. Our page on what a revision shoulder replacement involves sets that out in full, and how long a replacement lasts has the survival figures behind it. What none of this can do is tell you the state of your own implant, which is a question for your surgeon and an X ray.

That is exactly what I was after, thank you. The "change, not baseline" line is the one I will remember, because I would absolutely have talked myself out of mentioning new pain on the grounds that I am older now and everything aches.

Reading this as the one with a partial rather than a full replacement and it has slightly changed how I think about my own. I always assumed mine was the simple version so there was less to go wrong. Sounds more like mine is the one most likely to get converted to something else later if the socket wears, which nobody has ever said to me in those words. Not worried, but I will be asking at my next review rather than nodding along.