Thanks for all the great info Johanna! I hope that I recover as well as you are. Like I said earlier, I will be having surgery on my right side only. I have minor symptoms in my left side, but not enough to warrant surgery. I pray I will never need the left side surgery! I've been pretty freaked out by reading so many posts about folks who are in a lot of pain, recovering slowly, and/or not working anymore. I'm only 29 and my career is well on the right track--I'm not ready to give that up yet. I would be SO bored for the next 45 years!

My surgeon told me to take as much time as I could from work, and that I could not lift my arm above a 90 degree angle for at least 4 weeks. I have about 6 weeks of leave to take from my job, but then I'll have little to no time to take for PT appts and bad days. So I really hope that I can get back to work, even if it means I am sitting in my office all day doing nothing. I am in social work, so I can do the counseling piece with no problem. It's the documentation and the driving that I worry about. I did purchase voice recognition software (Dragon Naturally Speaking, it's great!!) which will help a lot with documentation. I usually drive about 300 miles a month on the job, some local, some long distance. So again that will be the biggest issue, next to managing the pain.

My beach trip should be pretty low key. It's a 3.5 hour drive, which my husband can do, and then we'll pretty much be either on the beach or at the house we are staying at. Most of my friends that are going will be partying, but I guess I will be feeling pretty good on my pain meds so I won't need to party. I can just sit and be mellow and laugh at them while they make fools of themselves.