Adventurous riding in a bicycle down the hill is a thrilling experience. Unfortunately, a bump on the road while going down causes you to fall off the bike and land heavily on your shoulder. Painful yes, but tolerable. The adrenaline rush gives you such a high and when you see that there is only minor bleeding from scratches and nothing seems to be broken, you continue down the hill and take the wild ride. You reach home, had the best day of your life and you intend to enjoy more tonight. Just as the adrenaline winds down, you start to feel intense pain when you move your arms. You target the pain as that on your collar bone and upon checking, you notice that there is swelling and tenderness.
You can ignore the pain and simply take some mild pain relievers. The next morning, your shoulders feel like it had been hit by a truck and you feel nauseous. Suspicious about the extent of the injury from the day before, you consult a physician in the emergency room. An X-ray later, you find out you have fractured your collar bone. The attending physician simply binds your shoulder in an elastic bandage and puts your arm on a sling. After some prescriptions, you are sent home and told not to do anything that might complicate the break. You were lucky. For some, a simple sling and binding will do the trick. For others with more severe breaks, a clavicle surgery has to be performed.
The clavicle, or the collar bone, can be easily fractured. Left to heal on its own, this will leave your body leaning like the tower of Pisa. If the clavicle surgery is done when the break is fresh, muscle strength could recover completely, if there is a delay, muscle endurance will be drastically weakened.
The clavicle surgery will involve securing a combination of screws and plates. This is a painful procedure and you will be given a lot of heavy duty analgesics to tolerate the pain. If the patient is an athlete, sometimes, pins and screws are not the only thing they will put in there. Titanium plates would have to be positioned critically to ensure that there will be opportunity for contact sports. With the titanium plates, the athlete can have an earlier chance at physical therapy to regain complete motion.
Recovery
Clavicle surgery recovery depends on several factors: age, health, complexity and location of the break and extent of the bone displacement.
For the younger patients, it takes less than 3 or 4 weeks of immobilization to allow healing of both bone and soft tissues. The younger the patient is, the less time is required for the recovery as they can still be growing. Adults have a longer time due to the fact that they have stopped growing.
For a few minutes each day and gradually increasing as the weeks progress, the sling may be removed to passively exercise the shoulder muscles. Full mobility will be achieved less than 16 weeks or four months for the younger patients. For the adults, it is the minimum and can maximize at 9 months. Full strength will be achieved in a minimum of 9 months to a maximum of 1 year.