GREEN BAY, Wis. -- When -- or if -- Aaron Rodgers gains the medical clearance he so desperately wants, he'll probably want to test his surgically repaired right collarbone to see if it can take a hit.

Perhaps the Green Bay Packers quarterback will even do what his old teammate and good friend Charles Woodson did before returning from his second broken collarbone during the 2012 NFC playoffs.

"I was at home and I was sitting around, and I was like, ‘I've got to test it out, to see if I can feel anything,'" Woodson, now an NFL analyst for ESPN, recalled during a recent interview on Wilde & Tausch on ESPN Wisconsin. "So I would kind of purposely fall off the side of my bed, onto my shoulder and my elbow, just to see if I could feel anything move. So I did that like 10 or 12 times. I might jump onto the bed and see how it felt. I'd get on the ground and roll around. I just wanted to know, ‘Is it going to feel right? Is it healed or is it not?'"

Former teammate Charles Woodson has a suggestion for how Aaron Rodgers can test his right collarbone. Dylan Buell/Getty Images

Rodgers underwent scans on Monday, and coach Mike McCarthy said team physician Dr. Pat McKenzie shared the results with a number of experts to review. The plan was to collect those doctors' recommendations, share them with Rodgers and the team's football brain trust -- McCarthy, general manager Ted Thompson and vice president of football administration Russ Ball -- and determine how to proceed.

The Packers are hoping the two-time NFL MVP will return to action for Sunday's game at Carolina, but there's no guarantee that will happen. McCarthy went into Tuesday hoping to get an answer before beginning full game-planning meetings with his staff.

"I'd like to know as soon as possible," McCarthy said Monday afternoon. "Frankly, it's best for Aaron to know as soon as possible. He's the one that has to get ready. Obviously in his mind he's ready to go if you watch him practice and [listened to] the conversations with him.

"But this is a medical decision and Dr. McKenzie is obviously in touch with a number of different medical experts and they're evaluating the information."

Much like Rodgers did on Monday, Woodson had his collarbone scanned after the 2012 regular-season finale in hopes of playing in the NFC wild-card round against the Minnesota Vikings. Woodson said that in his case, his collarbone was sufficiently healed to allow him to play but was not 100 percent healed.

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"We had done the X-rays and I was talking to Dr. McKenzie, and we looked at it and it didn't show that it was quite healed [completely]," Woodson recalled. "He explained to me that, ‘Charles, that doesn't mean that it's not healed.' You're kind of going through this mental roller coaster of, 'Man, is it healed? Is it not healed?'"

For Woodson, 2012 marked the second time he'd broken his left collarbone, having done it the first time during Super Bowl XLV in February 2011. Rather than having an entire offseason for the bone to heal as he did after the Packers won the title, Woodson was trying to come back after missing nine games -- and had concerns about how his collarbone would hold up when he tackled someone. Rodgers, who broke his collarbone on Oct. 15 and had surgery four days later, hasn't played in more than eight weeks.

"That was the scary part -- because you don't know," said Woodson, who played 63 snaps that night against the Vikings, registering six tackles, including one on running back Adrian Peterson for a 2-yard loss. "I really went into the game scared, not really knowing what was going to happen. I mean, you feel good about your shoulder being healed, but being in that position where you've broken it before, it's a funny feeling.

"Getting in there, getting that first tackle, hitting the ground a couple of times, having people fall on top of me on the side where I broke it -- and to get up with no pain? Let me tell you, that was a load off my shoulder."

Woodson said the Packers' equipment staff outfitted him with larger, heavier shoulder pads than he'd worn before his injury, although it's unclear how Rodgers' pads can be adjusted to provide additional protection should he be cleared to play Sunday. Woodson also said that while he got through the Packers' win over the Vikings "because of adrenaline," his issue was that "my legs were not quite there" the following week in a blowout loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round.

"So for Aaron Rodgers, the mental part of it, of getting hit and falling [are concerns]," Woodson said. "The way he fell when he got hurt, that's really a routine fall for most people in the NFL. You fall that way 100 times and nothing happens; the one time you land and the shoulder goes. So there's some things he's going to have to worry about.

"What he won't have to worry about is throwing the football. Just mentally, and his wind, that's what he'll have to worry about."

Editor's note: Jason Wilde covers the Green Bay Packers for ESPN Wisconsin and hosts Wilde & Tausch with former Packers offensive lineman Mark Tauscher weekdays on ESPN Milwaukee and ESPN Madison.