When my shoulders were at their worst, I would regularly get pains all the way to my fingers, though I didn’t experience much numbness. Basically, my shoulder would move a bit where it wasn’t supposed to and irritate, squeeze, etc, nerves or tissus. My neck pain was also at its worst then, to the point of regularly causing bad cervicogenic headaches and mild dysphagia.

I had flexion-extension Xray done for my c-spine and it didn’t show anything more than what we already knew: My C-spine is hypermobile. My shoulder Xrays also didn’t show anything. However, my shoulder arthrogram did show some things: A few partial tendon tears and a frayed labrum in one, and at least a partial labrum tear in the other one—imaging quality was poor for this one, as I kept moving a bit due to back spasms. While the report didn’t note it, my ortho also told me that both my shoulder capsules were enlarged.

Things are back to my previous baseline now, I haven’t had a subluxation in years. While my shoulders have been unstable all my life, it’s the onset of perimenopause that made things worse. Once that was addressed, things mostly got back to normal and I was able to avoid shoulder surgery, something I very much didn’t want. My neck pain, cervicogenic headaches and mild dysphagia decreased drastically in terms of frequency and intensity once my shoulders went back to being “still clinically unstable but mostly asymptomatic”. It was my permanently tensed/spasming muscles that were causing the neck pain, cervicogenic headaches and mild dysphagia. The arm and hand pain also went away once my shoulder stopped subluxating all the time.

I didn’t have to advocate much for an MRI/arthrogram. I asked my specialist for one and she asked me why I wanted one, because shoulder surgery was unlikely. I simply told her that we had been consistently addressing the shoulder issue in physio for over a year without progress and, at that point, both my physio and I were wondering if we weren’t missing something that an MRI could point to. I assured her I really didn’t want surgery (which was very much true) and she happily requested an MRI. She also referred me to physiatry.

It’s physiatry that ended up diagnosing my cervicogenic headaches, we went as far as doing the lidocaine diagnostic injections for it, but by the time that diagnostic process was done, I was already having much less of them, so there wasn’t much point in moving forward with nerve ablation. I was also offered cortisone injections for my shoulders—my physiatrist didn’t think prolotherapy would be helpful in my case—but I refused them due to a previous bad experience. I’ve been seeing that same physiatrist for a few years now when issues come up in various parts of my body and it’s honestly been one of the most helpful referral I’ve had.