Bless him, I had a letter from my surgeon explaining what he had done and what he couldn't do.
"The A/C joint a had significant amount of degeneration with massive, spikey osteophytes on the under-surface. These have all been resected, as has the a/c joint itself and the technical part of the decompression went without a hitch.
The major difficulty is that here is a significant loss of cartilage on the joint surface of the shoulder and the glenoid labrum is very compromised. Of more importance however is that fact that rotator cuff has an enormous tear in it with the edges retracted way beyond the glenoid making it irreparable.
We will see how you get on with the work that has been done but next time we meet we are going to have to have a serious chat as to whether we keep you ticking along with cortisone shots in the medium to long term or whether we have to think in terms of a reversed polarity prosthesis since no other surgical intervention is possible."
A reversed polarity shoulder replacement looks like an up-side-down hip replacement
However, last weekend, I did something really stupid in terms of extending my arm and sustained a sudden, really bad pain and what I think is a major tear of the long head of the biceps (where the red arrow is). As a result, I cannot do much with my arm at all now and the bruising is quite spectacular!
This has made me even more disabled that ever and I was really lucky to get in to see him the very next day which was yesterday. He gave me a cortisone shot to help alleviate the pain but it's not done much good! He also told me this was going to take 3-6 months to heal which was not what I wanted to hear!