A year after a reverse shoulder replacement, Vicki Reynolds won a kayaking competition. She has her doctor to thank, and a word of encouragement for people facing similar injuries. “You’re like, 'Oh, I'm injured. This is the end.’ And it's not.”
Time to Do Something
“I’ve had a fun and busy life,” said Vicki Reynolds, 73. “I started with horses, then motocross, rowing, swimming, woodworking. My shoulders have taken a beating.”
Reynolds, of Aberdeen, NC, lived with shoulder pain for years. In June 2023, it got so bad that she made an appointment with Tally E. Lassiter Jr., MD, an orthopaedic surgeon at Duke Health who specializes in shoulder surgery. He had performed a shoulder replacement, also called shoulder arthroplasty, on Reynolds’s neighbor and came highly recommended.
“Vicki’s shoulder was very painful, and she had limited motion and strength in it,” said Dr. Lassiter. “But it was very important to her to stay active.”
Reverse Shoulder Replacement Surgery
Because Reynolds had arthritis and also torn her rotator cuff, Dr. Lassiter recommended a reverse shoulder replacement. In this approach, the ball and socket of the artificial shoulder joint are reversed: a ball is attached where the shoulder socket normally sits, and a socket is fitted to the top of the upper arm bone. This would allow Reynolds to use muscles other than those in the rotator cuff to move her arm.
“A reverse shoulder replacement lets us address much more complex shoulder problems,” explained Dr. Lassiter. “It also lets us treat previous shoulder replacements that have failed.”
Dr. Lassiter performed the surgery that July. Afterward, “I had no pain,” reported Reynolds. Two days later, she began six weeks of physical therapy. Two months after the surgery, she was back to riding horses. “Dr. Lassiter is just the best,” said Reynolds. “He’s so encouraging. Most doctors would say, ‘You can’t do this; you can’t do that.’ He’s the opposite.”
Winning Medals
Today, Reynolds alternates paddling workouts with strength training, six times per week. In August 2025, she traveled to Seattle to race kayaks, where her team won the Master’s Cup in the Sprint nationals. Now she’s gearing up to race in Argentina in 2026. She’s also been referring people to Dr. Lassiter. “You can tell that Duke puts people first. Everything is so easy with them,” she said.
Seek Out Expertise
If you are considering a shoulder replacement, Dr. Lassiter stresses the importance of coming to a program like Duke’s that does many of them. “We have so many well-trained shoulder surgeons, and we do so much research in shoulder arthroplasty,” he said. “Duke is one of the highest-volume shoulder centers in the Southeast.”
