TIFU by not realizing my shoulder has been out of place for years

Hi Reddit. A few years ago, I injured my shoulder doing some dumb activity that I don’t remember. I thought at the time I tore my rotator cuff cause my shoulder was really hurting, and I couldn’t move it fully. Any time I raised my arm, it wouldn’t let me go past a certain point without a lot of pain.

I didn’t use it very much for about a month to try and “heal” it myself due to not being able to afford going to the doctor, and that seemed to help it! The pain went away when I wasn’t using it, and I thought that my injury was finally healing. Yay!

I started working out, and my shoulder pain came back with a vengeance. But I was stubborn - I wasn’t going to let my injury hold me back. I pushed through the pain because I figured if my shoulder got stronger, the muscles being built up would compensate for the “tear,” and eventually I wouldn’t even notice it was there, right?

So that’s what I did. And it actually worked a lot better than I expected it to! Over time, through working out, I noticed the pain less and less, and it stopped being something I thought about every time it started hurting. I still had a limited range of motion, but I stopped noticing that as well.

I got so used to it that I figured it had healed. I didn’t notice the pain when I worked out, even though it was still there. When I got into heavier weights, my shoulder would almost move, and it would pop a lot. I just associated that with it being normal due to the previous injury.

And then my girlfriend wanted to learn some cool dancing dips. We would practice me flinging her around, dipping her, you know, general dance moves.

WELL… we weren’t fully sober, and were just messing around with trying things we hadn’t before, being overly confident with new tricks in our inebriated state and shit.

I tried something new, and didn’t realize I was close to an obstacle. If I had continued, I would have booped her head into it, so to save her the pain, I instinctively moved her out of harm’s way, at the expense of my balance.

I fell hard on my shoulder (both my hands were on her), and I felt my shoulder dislocate, and then an immediate POP back into place. It hurt way less than I imagined a dislocation to feel, but I wasn’t even thinking about the pain… my shoulder had suddenly gotten its full range of motion back! Not only could I move it up and back (a motion previously impossible), but I could do it without any pain, or popping!

……

I’m such a dumbass y’all.

TL;DR - I (partially?) popped my shoulder out of place, thought for years it was a torn rotator cuff. Fully dislocated my shoulder, popped it back into the socket, and now my shoulder is fine.