For years, Rita Gill lived with constant shoulder pain—made worse every time she lifted her brother’s wheelchair in and out of the car. At one point, both her brother and mother relied on wheelchairs, and Rita struggled to lift them both, often through tremendous pain.
She tried physical therapy and cortisone shots for a year, but neither rid her of the pain in her shoulders.
“I was awake every night with throbbing pain and both shoulders would be throbbing and I would have to constantly reposition myself,” she said. “I put my hands up, I put them down by my side. I’d turn over on my side a little bit, but the pain was excruciating during the night.”
When cortisone wasn’t relieving Gill’s pain, she decided “something had to give here.”
She saw Tufts Medicine orthopedic surgeon Marie Walcott, MD, who recommended shoulder replacement surgery that would basically rebuild her shoulder.
“I was scared to death about having surgery,” said Gill, now 73. “I was like ‘How can I do this at this age and stuff, you know. How can I not drive for a couple of months’ but it all just worked out.”
Gill had a bilateral shoulder replacement at Tufts Medicine MelroseWakefield Hospital last September and again this past February when she was 72. Although the pain in her left shoulder was worse than the right, Gill and Dr. Walcott decided together to start with her dominant shoulder first.
“Dr. Walcott explained that this is basically 2 surgeries, if you look at my shoulders, they look a little bit different,” she said. “The right one is rounded like it should be, and the left one almost has this bump in it that…it’s titanium, but it feels like a piece of wood there, and it’s because she had to adjust them because the bone was so disintegrated.”
Recovery from the surgery was “rather easy considering I’m 73 years old,” said Gill. She recovered at home before starting physical therapy. She was feeling so good after her first surgery that she asked decided to go forward with her left shoulder only 5 months later.
Gill’s life is totally different since the surgeries.
“Before shoulder replacement, everything I did was painful, so if I adjusted the rearview mirror, it was painful,” she said. “If I reached things from the shelves, it was painful. I remember reaching in the washer and dryer to get clothes out. It was the whole positioning of my body that was just painful.”
Gill said any hesitations she had about going through with the second surgery were alleviated by Dr. Walcott’s calm, reassuring manner, reminding her about how well the first surgery went.
"I was concerned that surgery might make things worse, but Dr. Walcott told me that their goal was to give me a pain-free life—and that's pretty much what I have now."
Gill has just started lifting her brother’s wheelchair again and is adjusting to raise her arms high enough to get it into the back of the car.
She credits her Tufts Medicine team, including physical therapist Todd Haynes, and Dr. Walcott with her post-surgery success.
“I just really had a good team for recovery,” Gill said.
