Jerry Zezima holds a sore shoulder.
Jerry Zezima/TNS
If you need a shoulder to cry on, don’t blubber all over mine. I’m crying on my own shoulder these days because I have an injured rotator cuff.
This means, unfortunately, that I won’t be able to pitch in the major leagues or make game-winning shots in the NBA.
My mother once tore her rotator cuff in a fall down the stairs and couldn’t play in our family Wiffle ball league, where she was an ace hurler who set a record for strikeouts, mostly against me.
And my rotator-cuff issue will prevent me from taking on LeBron James because I can’t even make three-pointers when I try to shoot napkin balls into the garbage can in the kitchen.
“You missed,” my wife, Sue, often huffs as she picks them up.
“No, I didn’t,” I respond feebly. “I was aiming for the floor.”
But it’s no use. My sports career, which was just getting started even though I am almost 70 years old, is over.
That’s what my doctor suggested when I went for a routine examination and complained about the pain in my right shoulder.
“It’s your rotator cuff,” he said after asking me to raise my sore arm above my empty head. “I don’t know if it’s torn, but I suspect it’s calcified.”
“I thought the only thing in my body that’s calcified is my brain,” I said.
“That would be a bigger problem,” the doctor said. “But you need to go for physical therapy.”
I made an appointment at a rehabilitation center and saw Danielle Bifolco, an excellent and personable physical therapist who asked how I injured my rotator cuff.
“Either bench-pressing my grandchildren or doing 12-ounce curls,” I replied.
Danielle asked me to sit in a chair and look directly at her.
“Your posture could be better,” she informed me. “You’re a little off.”
“I’ve been off for years,” I confessed.
“You’re tilted a bit,” she said.
“Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa?” I wondered.
“And you’re stiff,” Danielle added as she checked out my upper torso.
“This is more serious than I thought,” I said. “I hope rigor mortis isn’t setting in.”
“I don’t think so,” said Danielle, who asked me to turn my head.
I winced and said, “I’m a pain in my own neck.”
“Lift your left arm,” Danielle instructed.
“It feels OK,” I said.
“Now lift your right arm,” she said.
“Ouch!” I shrieked.
“Are you right-handed?” Danielle asked.
“I’m ambidextrous,” I told her. “Incompetent with both hands.”
After putting me through more routines — pushing out, up and down against her hands, reaching down to touch my upper spine with each hand and reaching up with each hand to touch the middle of my back, all of which sent lightning bolts through my right shoulder — Danielle said, “I think your infraspinatus muscle is irritated.”
She explained that the infraspinatus is one of the four muscles of the rotator cuff.
“Its function is to rotate the humerus,” Danielle said.
“There’s nothing humorous about it,” I replied.
“I am going to put you on a home exercise program,” she said.
The first exercise entailed standing in a doorway and, using a folded towel as a cushion, pushing my right arm against the frame.
“You’ve got me in a jamb,” I noted.
Danielle smiled and said, “You could do it against a wall, too.”
“I’m off the wall,” I told her. “Will it still work?”
“With you, I don’t know,” said Danielle, who gave me a printout of the exercises, which included the isometric internal rotation, isometric external rotation and isometric abduction. Each set should be done for 10 seconds and repeated 10 times. The exercises should be performed four times a week.
“They will help strengthen your rotator cuff,” Danielle said. “Just be careful when you bench-press your grandchildren. And enjoy the 12-ounce curls.”
Jerry Zezima writes a humor column for Tribune News Service and is the author of six books. His latest is “One for the Ageless: How to Stay Young and Immature Even If You’re Really Old.” Reach him at [email protected] or via jerryzezima.blogspot.com.
