A common misconception about surgery of any kind is that it restores an injured body part to exactly how it felt before the injury. In the case of lip surgery to repair a torn orbicularis oris, we might imagine that it would make an injured trumpet player’s chops feel and behave the way they did before he got hurt in the first place. That seems to make sense and would be totally awesome, but sadly, that ain’t the way it works.

You know that feeling you get when you discover great new music? Whether it’s Steely Dan, the latest Dave Douglas record, or a brand new Chicago Symphony recording, we all know that feeling of “Yes, exactly! I completely get this. This is awesome.” When you’re an injured musician, that’s what it’s like to stumble upon someone else’s account of their injury and recovery. That feeling of “Wow, that’s exactly how I feel!

When something’s seriously wrong with your playing, it’s hard to know where to begin. Big questions start to eat at you: “Should I keep performing, or should I take time off?” “If so, how much time?” “What do I do about my playing commitments?” The problem isn’t just that these are big questions, it’s that we often try to make these decisions with insufficient information, acting either with too much caution or not enough.

“Every cloud has a silver lining.” “There’s a light at the end of every tunnel” “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Blah, blah, blah. Glib quotes like these are worse than useless to a musician who’s just experienced an injury. At first, it’s impossible to “stay positive” or “focus on the good.” All we can focus on is what we’ve lost, the thing we love the most: our ability to make music.

As a music major and later a young freelance trumpet player, I knew almost nothing about performance injuries. They just weren’t talked about as far as I can remember, and though I was likely a little naive, I know I’m not the only one who was in the dark. The fact is, we musicians often find ourselves in situations where we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone when it comes to physical endurance, and it’s hard to know where to draw the line.

This is one of a series of six posts covering my lip injury and surgery. Here’s Part I. With my recovery from my six-month-old lip surgery an apparent failure (judging by the the shooting pains I regularly experienced while playing) and an interesting new career as an academic advisor, I put the trumpet down for a while. Now, it would make for a much better story if I could say that, after much anguished soul-searching, I confidently left music behind and began a new phase of my life, but the truth is I just didn’t pick up a trumpet for a lot of days in a row.

This is one of a series of six posts covering my lip injury and surgery. Here’s Part I. Before I get into my long–term recovery, I thought I’d include a few more details on what it’s like living with a bunch of fresh stitches in your top lip, which is part of the mouth, which is a part of the human body that moves a lot. A lot. My surgeon, Dr.

This is one of a series of six posts covering my lip injury and surgery. Here’s Part I. Okay, this is a long one. Grab a cup of coffee and hunker down! With my lip surgery scheduled for December 17th, 2011, I had a couple of months to kill before the big day. My surgeon, Dr. McGrail, had cleared me to continue playing and gigging if I wanted - the muscle was already torn, and in such a way that it wasn’t going to get any more torn if I kept playing.

This is one of a series of six posts covering my lip injury and surgery. Here’s Part I. It was November 2010, and I was sitting on a stool in a doctor’s office in Toronto while an elderly surgeon probed, poked and palpated my upper lip. After a thorough examination, Dr. McGrail, the expert facial surgeon I’d flown to Toronto to see, took off his latex gloves and uttered perhaps the sweetest words I’d ever heard: “Well, I don’t think you’ve torn it.

This is one of a series of six posts covering my lip injury and surgery. Here’s Part I.

Even with a fresh lip injury, a month off the horn seemed impossible. Before the injury, playing the trumpet, thinking about playing the trumpet and listening to other people play the trumpet used so much of my time and energy that I scarcely knew what to do with myself when I decided to put the horn in its case for four weeks. With little else to do besides drink coffee and twiddle my thumbs, I started learning guitar and reading a lot, starting with the scant literature on chop injuries. I began with Lucinda Lewis' two excellent books on the subject, Broken Embouchures and Embouchure Rehabilitation. I started heavily researching lip injuries in brass players, and I found several trumpet players who’d experienced similar injuries. I pestered everyone I could into talking to me on the phone and tried to gather as much information as I could.