Hello,

My name is Nick and I used to do all sorts of crazy things - including Hang Gliding.

I never used to worry about my body letting me down and I enjoyed the stimualtion of an active life, until the age of 36 when I crashed my hang glider and dislocated my right shoulder. That was in 2009.

Now in 2017 I still suffer the effects of that injury, in that my shoulder still casues me a lot of problems - pain, sleep issues, lack of enthusiasm for activity and all of the phycological stress that comes with that.

I have had a number of surgical procedures since 2009, mostly to attempt to repair my reptator cuff tendons that were damaged in the accident. If you don't know what the rotator cuff is, you can read all about it here.

Rotator cuff repair surgery has a bit of an unfortunate reputation in that is is very painful and often fails (retears). This has been my experience! Once a repaired tendon has retorn, it becomes harder to re-repair due to scarring and tissue degradation. There are likely to be many thousands of people in the UK living with irrepairable rotator-cuff repairs that are either too large to repair or have been repaired previously and subesquently retorn. The reality for these people - especially among the younger and more active - is unpleasant to say the least. I am one of them.

This blog is about my attempt to overcome this enormous challenge, against seemingly insurmountable odds. Medical science has kept moving since my accident in 2009 and there is now - in 2017 - a treatment for this group of people in form of an allograft. An allograft is a piece of human derived skin tissue from a donor (cadaver) with all of it's DNA removed to avoid rejection. This can be used to bridge holes, defects and tears in tendons like the rotator cuff (and achilles) to repair and restore function whilst integrating with the host tissue. The name of the allograft product I am to receive is called GraftJacket.