The redness was the first symptom, tinging Merrill Kelly’s right hand in August 2020. That’s weird, he thought, after noticing the color while writing something in his San Diego hotel room. He brushed it off, though, thinking it could be sun exposure.Then, over a three-week span, the color climbed up his arm. An initial ultrasound and MRI came back clean. But when his arm turned purple and started to feel, as Kelly put it, “sludgy,” he’d had enough.Kelly was scratched from his start on Aug. 24 after telling Arizona Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo that he needed to be shut down until they figured out what was going on. The next morning, an ultrasound revealed a blood clot in his right shoulder. Two weeks later, he underwent surgery for vascular thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) — a condition Kelly admittedly knew little about. So, he picked up the phone.“I talked to as many people as I could, and then I quickly realized that it’s a lot more common than what I thought it was,” Kelly said.Kelly had mostly heard of neurogenic TOS cases, like pitcher Stephen Strasburg’s. But he was diagnosed with venous or vascular thoracic outlet syndrome, just as Phillies ace Zack Wheeler was this August.There is no one-size-fits-all recovery path, no common experience. Kelly’s post-surgery career success, however, offers some optimism and lessons for what could await Wheeler. The Phillies righty suffered a blood clot near his right shoulder on Aug. 15, then was diagnosed with venous thoracic outlet syndrome about a week later. Wheeler, 35, will undergo thoracic outlet decompression surgery on Tuesday with Dr. Robert Thompson in St. Louis. Last month, the Phillies said the post-surgery recovery timeline generally is six to eight months. If all goes to plan, Wheeler would be back on the mound early in the 2026 season.