After shoulder surgery, use an abduction pillow sling to keep your arm parallel to the floor with your hand near your belly button. Remove the initial dressing the day after surgery and apply Band-Aids over each incision, changing them daily for 3 to 5 days. The surgical glue will fall off naturally over 10 to 14 days.
We want to show you some examples of slings that you may have after a shoulder procedure. This is an example of a simple sling. A simple sling is typically used when we do a procedure where somebody's moving right away, such as a lysis of adhesions or simply decompression procedure.
This is an example of an abduction pillow sling, which is the most common type of sling you'll have after your surgery. Before your surgery, you'll be fitted for this sling by one of our bracing professionals, but oftentimes people ask about what the positioning of their arm should be. When you have this sling on, you should make note that the arm should be roughly parallel to the floor and that the hand should be about midline in the body, just above the belly button.
You want to pay close attention to the rehab plan we provide for you after the procedure, but it's okay to take the sling off, especially if you're sitting in a chair such as this You can sit with your arms slightly out to the side to protect the, the shoulder. Now, for putting the sling back on, you can do this yourself. You want to have the sling at the side. One can reach in. Once you reach into the sling, there's a strap that pulls around. You can buckle this in, in the front, and then you want to reach over and take the strap over the top. This is a way to put the sling on. By yourself. This is an example of a dressing after an arthroscopic surgery. After arthroscopic surgery, you can take the dressing off the day after surgery. You'll see a large bandage. Don't get concerned if you see some color change there. That's just because fluid can kind of come out of the wound. You will just want to simply peel this dressing off. You'll see this large tape. You'll see what are called some 4x4s underneath. And then over each incision site, there'll be a non-adhesive dressing called an Adaptic. This covers the glue and incision site, so you can simply peel this off. You want to peel each off individually. You'll see glue underneath those sites, so the absorbable sutures underneath the skin, and then you can apply Band-Aids to each spot. Spot. There'll typically be 3 to 4 incisions after an arthroscopic surgery. The Band-Aids can be changed every day or every other day for about 3 to 5 days, and then you can leave the incisions open. Just like with an open procedure, you just want to leave the glue on and let it fall off on its own. That typically takes about 10 to 14 days after the procedure. There's no need to put any ointment over the wounds.
So this is an example of a dressing that you might have after an open shoulder surgery, which would be either a shoulder replacement or reverse replacement, or possibly after fracture care. This is a dressing that is waterproof, and what you'll see is that this plastic part is completely waterproof. You can take a shower 2 days after your surgery. You're going to want to remove this dressing after your shower. By just peeling back the corner of the plastic. Underneath that, you'll see a little netting dressing as well, which will also just gently peel off. This is a non-adhesive dressing that should just peel off. Underneath this, you'll see your incision with absorbable sutures that are deep to the skin, as well as the skin glue over the top. Once you take the dressing off, you can go ahead and put on a new Island Dressing that you'll be supplied with. The dressing will go over the same incision and will cover the same area just to help protect it.
