Under the Knife: By Allen Johnson

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Under the Knife

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This year I drove my Mopar Dodge Avenger with a large tear in the tendon of my right bicep, and following the season finale at Pomona it was finally time to go under the knife to have surgery.

The doctor said the surgery went very well. While I haven’t seen the incision yet, I do have a humongous cast from the shoulder to the wrist, so I’m taking his word for it. The cast I have right now is a hard one, so that you can’t bend your elbow at all. That gives the tendon time to heal back to the bone. I had a little bit of pain for a few days afterward, but feel pretty good now. I had the procedure on a Thursday morning and was back up and at ‘em by Saturday morning and haven’t looked back yet!

While working on the torn bicep tendon the doctor found a bone spur in my right arm and had to fix that as well. The tendon was 50 percent torn loose, so what they do is take it the rest of the way loose. Then they drill a hole in your bone and put an anchor pin in there and stretch your tendon back over the anchor pin and sew the tendon back to the bone.

I’m going back to the doctor this Friday, which will be two weeks since the surgery, and he might take this cast off and put another on. I may wind up in a progressive cast, where they unwind your arm 10 degrees at a time for four weeks until the arm is back out straight. After that, you start rehabbing and building the tendon back up.

Last time I wrote, I said I’d have to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my left hand and I successfully did that twice. My family has a dinner on the Sunday before Thanksgiving and my wife Pam’s family has it on Thanksgiving Day. It kind of separates it out, so you don’t have to eat twice in one day. We had a good family gathering, as both of my daughters came in and I got to spend a lot of time with my grandkids as well.

I’ve had a good time keeping everyone updated on the Greeneville High School football team this fall and their march through the playoffs. I have some more good news. The Green Devils have won a couple of more games since I last blogged and they are headed to the state championship game this Saturday night in Cookeville at Tennessee Tech. This is the third straight year they have been in the state finals. They lost in 2009 and won it last year, so they are going for two championships in a row.

Also this weekend is the PRI (Performance Racing Industry) Trade Show in Orlando. I won’t be going because of the arm, but my dad and some of the team members will head down to PRI to scope out some of the new gadgets and visit the Mopar folks in their booth.

Pam and I have a trip planned next week to go to a friend’s wedding in the Dominican Republic. It was kind of questionable if we would be able to go or not with my arm, but we’re going to try it. We’ll leave next Monday and stay down there through Friday for the wedding.

The off-season is already going by pretty quick and it will be time to climb back in my Mopar Dodge Avenger before I know it for the 2012 season. I can’t wait for my arm to heal to get behind the wheel again!

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