Ouch man that sucks. I’ve dislocated both of my shoulders a few times, but none of them were that bad. I’ve always been able to get my shoulder back in place on my own; it’s never been out more than a couple minutes.
That said, I do have to be careful. Even though I’ve done it a few times, it hurts just as bad every time I do it. After doing it once, everything stays stretched, so it’s that much easier for it to dislocate the next time. It will take a lot more than 6 weeks to recover completely. Especially if you’re going to be immobilized. I’ve had my whole arm immobilized for a month (that was a broken bone, not a dislocation), and the muscle that you lose takes a lot of work and many months to build back up, as well as getting your full range of motion back. It’s even harder because everything is so loosely held together, so your strength training will have to be very little at a time to make sure you don’t pop it out again.
If you have surgery, your shoulder will be a lot tighter (and building your strength back up will be faster, but recovering range of motion will be a little more difficult. Overall, having surgery would probably be the better option. It’s less likely to dislocate again if you have surgery.
If you don’t have surgery, the basic effect is this: Your ligaments stretch, and when they stretch to a certain point, they will never go back to what they originally were. That means that you need something else to hold the joint together. The answer is muscle. You need to build enough muscle in your shoulder area to make up for the much less effective ligaments. Doing activities such as climbing (once you’ve built enough strength to do it) really builds muscle in the shoulder areas as well as helps with your range of motion.
Unfortunately a dislocation is much worse than a broken bone since a broken bone will heal completely but with a dislocation, your arm will never be the same. If you do enough therapy you can get it mostly back to how it should be. You can also probably continue with what you like to do (such as skiing), but from my experience, it’s something I still do have to be careful of.
Ultimately it’s really up to you how complete your recovery is. Make sure you do the exercises you need to do to build your strength and recover ROM and your life will be able to go back to normal. I made the mistake of not doing everything I should have, so one arm was always considerable stronger than the other. I’m back to normal now, unfortunately that’s because I broke the other arm which balanced the strength out.
I hope everything goes well for you.
