About 5 years ago my doctor basically told me that unless I'm on the pro circuit playing volleyball, I shouldn't take the risk of doing surgery.  He actually didn't do any tests or anything except moved my arm around a little bit.  So, he just said to do at home therapy to strengthen the joint and then live with it.  That worked for a while since I was moving around the country and only playing vball sporatically and recovering from an ancle injury.  But I decided that now that I'm playing regularly and want to continue for many years as a way of maintaining my weight, "just live with it" is no longer acceptable. 

So I went to see an orthopedic specialist this time.  He started off with moving my shoulder in a bunch of different ways.  At first I was getting worried that he wasn't replicating the pain and he'd say it wasn't that bad.  But finally, he did one last test that sent me through the roof.  He said he was pretty sure it was a SLAP tear and wanted to do an MR arthrogram to make sure.

Honestly before I got the results back, my biggest fear was that he'd say they couldn't find anything.  But I got the results back last week and sure enough, there is a Type 1 or 2 tear as well as some minor tears in the rotator cuff.  He said I could just live with it since it doesn't impact my daily life, but it will likely never get better since SLAP tears don't really heal without surgery.  Or I could do the surgery.  I didn't really have to think about it too much and told him to get it scheduled.

Since the diagnosis, I've been reading through the posts on this site to educate myself on the recovery process.  Going through the posts I kind of got freaked out a bit since I'm learning that this is a long recovery process post op.  I expected some time in a sling and a few months of PT, but I had no idea it would be potentially 6-12 months of recovery.  It does sound like I have a relatively minor tear.  So, I'll plan for the long term but hope for what my doc is telling me, 3-6 months.