Arthroscopic Shoulder Surgery Video: Diossy's Story

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Transcript

Diossy: I did 20 years in the military. I was deployed in Iraq, 26 combat missions. I was a naval rescue swimmer. It was a very physically demanding job. It’s you, the water and your survivor. You do whatever you can to save their life. I started to feel a pain in my shoulder, and it radiated through my neck. Showing a weakness to your junior personnel was just not an option, so I just pressed on. I feel a sharp pain right here.

Dr. Damion Valletta, Orthopedic Surgery: Yeah. 

Diossy: It hasn’t gotten better, it’s just been there...been there.

Dr. Valletta: He came in complaining of shoulder pain that had become so terrible that he couldn’t raise his arm above shoulder level.

Diossy: It was about an eight or a nine, and I could tolerate a lot.

Dr. Valletta: He has a tear in the cartilage in the top of his socket, and that’s where the cartilage is detached from the bone.

Diossy: With my experience in the military, I thought I could be a great law enforcement officer. I went through six months of academy training. You run, you do push-ups, you climb walls; I made it through.

Dr. Valletta: When you bring your arm up overhead, you’re pushing on the cartilage that’s torn. That hurts. In order to fix that, what we do is we stick the cartilage back to the bone. The procedure is being done at Sharp Coronado Hospital. They have all brand new arthroscopy equipment and arthroscopy towers.

Diossy: One of the decisions I made was to resign my position. To turn in my gun, to turn in my badge. It seemed like I lost a part of me. I wanted to go out and help people.

(morning of surgery)

Diossy: Andrew and Anthony, they’re typical boys that like to wrestle with Dad. Unfortunately now, I don’t do that. Even with my one-year-old daughter, I don’t carry her with my left arm. I still remember when my father used to put me on his back. Those are the same things that my kids like, you know?

Nancy Ledgerwood, RN, Ambulatory Care: You want people to feel right at home here. They’re nervous as it is, so when they come in, you need to just take care of them, in anyway you would your own family.

Dr. Valletta: Left side is the correct side?

Diossy: Left side is the correct side.

Dr. Valletta: There you go, I put little initials to yourself to show we’ve both confirmed it. You know when you go off to sleep with the anesthesia, you know, have some good thoughts going off because people usually wake up thinking about what they drifted off with.

Diossy: Thanks, doc.

Dr. Valletta: We’ll see you down there in a few minutes.

Diossy: All right.

Dr. Valletta: What we’ve refined over the past ten years is arthroscopic techniques, where through small poke holes, you can insert a camera and instruments. And those instruments can be used to reattach the cartilage to the bone without the need for cutting muscles or tendons, and therefore the patient’s able to resume motion more quickly after surgery.

Dr. Valletta: And if we look down the front side of his shoulder, he’s got a lot of fraying and irregularity here of this cartilage rim. If we go down to the bottom side of his shoulder the cartilage looks normal again. So this is a very extensive injury, you can just see, it’s chewed up. So what we’re doing now is we’re just trying to clean up the loose cartilage fragments. We use a sliding knot technique in order to hold the cartilage that we’ve placed back onto the sides. That’s all stable now.

Dr. Paul Cotten, Anesthesiology: This is Dr. Cotten, is this Mercy? I just wanted to let you know that everything is going very well. Dr. Valletta is doing a great job. It’s probably going to be another 45 minutes.

Mercy (Diossy's wife): Boys, you can say “hi” to him, too.

Diossy’s Younger Son: Hi, Daddy.

Diossy’s Older Son: Hi, Dad. Daddy, wakey, wakey.

Dr. Valletta: Everything well with your shoulder okay? You’re going to rest up tonight and then I’ll see you in the morning. And, your family plans on just being able to bring you home tomorrow.

(early the next morning)

Healing Touch Therapist: We’re going to hold our hands just nice and close to your body. And what we feel when we do this is a tingling in our fingers.

Second Healing Touch Therapist: We offer complimentary therapies, which include: aromatherapy, comfort massage, and healing touch.

Cathy McJannet, RN, Healing Touch: Studies that have been done with healing touch show that patients with healing touch and orthopedic surgeries heal approximately twenty percent faster.

Healing Touch Therapist: We just allow all this healing energy to go back into where all the surgery’s been.

Dr. Valletta: Everything went well. It was more extensive in terms of the tear going from the front all the way around to the back, then we could originally appreciate.

Diossy: So it was actually worse?

Dr. Valletta: Well there was a lot of damage in there, and you continued to use your shoulder with the existing damage.

Diossy: I’ve been holding back from getting this fixed, and now I know that once this gets better, I’m going to be so much better off. Don’t wait until it hurts real bad to go see the doctor; that’s a lesson learned.

(six weeks later)

Diossy: Without hurting myself I can get my arm up that high now. I was only expecting, maybe this high. But now it’s like ah, I can go back to the law enforcement, I can go back to working on aircrafts if I want to. I am much happier, because I got something fixed that was broken. Now, I have hope.