Hi Tom,

About that PT, my observation with respect to the pain , is that PT has always been very painful. But pain is transient and gone when whatever is causing it stops banging on it.

When my chest was crushed, one of the strange side-effects was that my right shoulder went "dark" on the nerve-net. I could not raise it or bend it. And being in an army hospital at the time, I had to shave daily so I ended up holding the razor in my right hand, and moving it around my face with my left.

I started PT for my right arm/shoulder very soon after, and in a few weeks, my arm/shoulder was working again. That PT was excruciatingly painful, but it got better and restored the arm. Please don't get tempted to short the PT just to avoid the transient pain lest you turn a transient disfuncton into a permanent one. I know a LOT of people who do/have done EXACTLY that.

An ironic aside; The PT team consisted of a Nurse and a senior NCO. The NCO had a very pronounced condition called "Drop Foot," in which nerve damage makes the foot go off-net. That prevents the the Achilles tendon from being exercised, and it shortens under the normal tension it operates under.

PT for such a condition, like all PT I've encountered, is quite painful, and this NCO apparently decided to avoid it. Bad strategic move, I'd say.

I walked out of the hospital the next day, 37 days after being admitted DoA. And I was medically cleared to go back to jumping out of airplanes 32 days later.

[Caveat and disclaimer: The following information is from Jan, '67. Medical advances since then MAY have made some of it obsolete.]

Nerves are a bit tricky. Just before I returned to Vietnam I had a very skilled nerve specialist run a series of tests on me to determine the state and prognosis for my nerve-healing. He told me that most cut nerves do regenerate by producing new growth of the nerve cell, from the cut to the connection point with the destination and do so at the approximate rate of 1.2 cm/month.

Measure the distance (in cm) from the cut to the muscle that is off-net, divide by 1.2 and you know APPROXIMATELY how long it will take to complete the healing. Also, if significantly more time goes by and the muscle still has not recovered function, it's likely that the nerve involved is not going to regenerate.

Nerves damaged at the connection with the spinal cord (I have some of those) do not regenerate.