SPRING HILL, Tenn. — After a serious hiking injury on the challenging Camelback Mountain in Arizona, Bill Brown faced a long and difficult path to recovery. With injuries including a broken shoulder, six cracked ribs and a punctured lung, his journey back to health required multiple surgeries and extensive rehabilitation.
Following initial treatment in Arizona, Brown turned to Maury Regional Physical Therapy in Spring Hill where he began an intensive therapy program to regain strength and mobility in his shoulder. With three sessions each week under the guidance of therapists Joshua Lunn, PT, DPT, Tyler Clark, PT, DPT, Amanda Kesterson, PT, DPT, and Lori Czaplewski, PTA, Brown made remarkable progress over a grand total of 48 appointments.
“I’m very goal oriented, and I’m driven when I set my mind to something,” said Brown. “A few months into physical therapy, my wife and I decided we’d travel back to Scottsdale, Arizona, to visit our friends, and I was determined to play pickleball. I brought my racket to our PT sessions, and they built it into my recovery program. The staff was wonderful to work with. Joshua Lunn was very innovative with how to approach my treatment. Tyler and Amanda were phenomenal to work with and helped push me every visit — they matched my energy and fueled my drive.”
As a point of measurement, the shoulder’s potential is a full 180-degree range from a resting position parallel with the torso to lifting into the air parallel with your head; however, this varies from person to person and can also sit in a range of 150-170 degrees and still be considered healthy depending on health conditions and age. After four months of continued improvement, Brown was able to have better range in his injured shoulder at 167 degrees of motion versus his uninjured arm, which had 164 degrees of motion.
“Bill was very determined,” shared Lunn. “As a physical therapist, we’re there to push our patients and help them succeed, but when our patients are motivated, it has a great impact on their recovery. Bill is a perfect example of that determination.”
Today, Brown continues to do at-home physical therapy exercises and set new goals!
“The probability that I survived a fall on Camelback Mountain is incredible. I should have been dead,” said Brown. “My advice to anyone looking to recover in physical therapy after an extreme shoulder injury is to take baby steps and stay driven. There will be some pain, but there’s so much more to gain by sticking with the program provided by your physical therapists.”
Maury Regional Health offers physical therapy services to help you return to doing what you love across eight locations in Columbia, Spring Hill, Lewisburg, Chapel Hill, Pulaski, Hohenwald, Mount Pleasant and Waynesboro.
To learn more, visit MauryRegional.com/PhysicalTherapy.
