One Avera patient is back at bat thanks to a successful surgery. Autumn Emme suffered from shoulder pain for years and finally has some relief.
You can often find Autumn Emme out on the softball field.
She’s been playing the game since she was five years old.
“I played little leagues, and then all the way up 8U, 10U, 12U, 14U, 16U, 18U,” said Avera patient, Autumn Emme.
But for the last few years she’s been dealing with shoulder pain that became more persistent.
“I’ve had it since I started to change my throw when I first joined a travel team and it got to the point where it was starting to affect my ability to play,” said Emme. “I had a really hard throw, my arm would basically feel like it was coming out of the socket and if I tried to lift up my arm it did not feel the best.”
She decided it was time to get it checked out.
“She plays a lot of softball, so she is always swinging her arms around and so shoulder instability is typically loose ligaments and so this was her dominant arm and I think just over time her shoulder got loose, she didn’t have a specific injury where her shoulder dislocated so it’s a little bit harder to diagnose,” said Orthopedic Surgeon at Avera St. Anthony’s, Ryan Sieg, MD. “We got some x-rays, which were normal, but she hadn’t done any formal physical therapy and we tried to rehab her with physical therapy and non-surgical management,”
A few months later, Autumn was still having pain. “We got her into surgery, it’s a shoulder scope, so it’s small incisions around the shoulder, about one centimeter big and we introduce a camera inside so we can look at everything, so it’s a minimally invasive surgery,” said Dr. Sieg. “When we got in there, I could actually move the shoulder back and forth and it would dislocate anterior and posterior and inferior, it was just coming out of the socket, the entire thing, so we had to end up stabilizing it.”
“What you do is you tighten up the ligament and the capsule and the labrum and you bring up that tissue and you drill little holes about a millimeter in size into the socket and then lift the tissue into those little holes so it props the shoulder back up.”
Next it was time for rehab and recovery.
“The first six weeks you are in a sling, supported all the time, you’ll take it off a few times a day to move your elbow up and down,” said Dr. Sieg. “After 12 weeks we strengthen as tolerated, it takes about three months to get their strength back to where they like their shoulder, so it’s a good six month rehab.”
Autumn is now past the six months and is back on the ball field. She even received an MVP award at one of her recent tournaments.
What is even more exciting is she will now be able to play softball in college.
“I’m going to go to Nebraska Wesleyan University to hopefully play another four years of ball and study pre-med and minor is business,” said Emme. “I don’t have any pain so I’ve been able to throw for the first time in seven years without pain and it feels great, I can do a lot more things that I haven’t been able to do.”
