Adventurous riding on a bicycle or motorbike, is a thrilling experience, but unfortunately, a bump or oil slick on the road, may cause you to fall off the bike, and land heavily on your shoulder, possibly necessitating clavicle surgery. Just as the adrenaline winds down, you start to feel intense pain, when you move your arm. You target the pain as coming from your collar bone [clavicle], and upon checking, you notice that there is swelling and tenderness.
Will I need clavicle surgery ?
The next morning, your shoulder feels like it has been hit by a truck, and you may 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 are given, 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 may leave your body leaning slightly to one side. If the clavicle surgery is done when the break is fresh, muscle strength could recover completely, but if there is a delay, muscle endurance may be 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 painkillers, to tolerate the pain. If the patient is an athlete, sometimes, pins and screws are not the only thing that will be inserted. 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, following clavicle surgery.
However, a far less invasive procedure is arthroscopic surgery and this also has a much shorter recovery time, with far greater strength recovery. So remember to get at least two doctor’s opinions as to whether your particular injury can be healed by arthroscopic clavicle surgery.
Recovery after clavicle surgery
Clavicle surgery recovery depends on several factors: age, health, complexity and location of the break, and extent of the bone displacement.
For 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 are still growing. Adults take a longer time to recover from clavicle surgery, 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 in less than four months, for the younger patients. For the adults, four months is the minimum, and can maximize at 9 months. Full strength will be achieved in a minimum of 9 months to a maximum of one year, following clavicle surgery.