Originally Posted by tos8

Yes. I was diagnosed with a winged scap before the word TOS even came out of a drs mouth. I ended up having surgery for my TOS before my scap and that was a HUGE mistake. I have whats called serrates antior palsy. There is NOTHING wrong with my long thoracic nerve. But the muscle (serrates antior) that controles the scapula, no longer functions like it should and causes scapula winging. Its rare, and even more rarer to find in a TOS paitent, which is why there were so many conflicting diagnoses when I was having both problems and why my TOS surgeon and Ortho have never had a case that had both problems. My crappy TOS surgeon told me it was related to my TOS and it would go away after surgery, my ortho said no it was a separate problem and it needed to be fixed. However I had a DVT and at the time my TOS surgeon had a more compelling case. I had the TOS surgery and it never corrected and about a year later that's when my TOS surgeon said "well it must be a separate issue", no duh! I went back to my ortho a couple of years later and he looked over everything and he said he could do surgery to fix my scap, however he would have needed to get into the same area where my TOS surgery was and he wasn't sure how bad it was going to be in there (scar tissue, muscles moved around into different areas do to rib removal) and where as he usually he has an 80% success rate, he was only giving me 50-50% because he couldn't guarantee that I would have more complications or not or that it would hold do to the TOS surgery. We tried PT, nothing has worked. Theres nothing I can do about it, unless I want a very invasive surgery that isn't guaranteed to work with possible more complications and im not willing to chance that again. Hes a very good surgeon, he did my friends surgery and she had a very successful surgery and he has done Olympians surgeries and they have done well. Hes very up front and honest and im thankful for that. He never pressured me into surgery and he told me what his actual success rate was and what mine looked like. You don't get to many surgeons like that. So if you HAVENT had TOS surgery and have this issue, look at ALL your options and find the right surgeon to look into this problem.

Its also very possible that my ortho was correct and I should have had the surgery for my scap first and see if that fixed the rest of the problems.



EDIT: Also look into taping with a PT. It can really help and gave me some relief when we did it. I just didn't have no results with it. I know others that had great results with it. But it doesn't hurt to try if you have the right PT that can do it and give you the manual work and exercises for your scap.