Thanks for all the help folks. Sorry for no reply for a while, I had jury duty on a criminal case basically all last week....

I did get it sorted out, and I did implement a combination of suggestions. I'm using the *Home, *End for selection, and am iteratively moving backwards line by line to find the word I'm looking for. It seems to work out well. It also became useful when another document had a slightly different format w/ multiple tables for a single Table1 heading. Of course, I'm going to have to do this for multiple documents now with differing formats... yay.. Thanks for all the help! example code for those interested:

  while ($tablefound == 0){
    $word->Selection->MoveUp(wdLine,1);
    $word->Selection->HomeKey(wdLine);
    $word->Selection->EndKey(wdLine, wdExtend);

    my $str = $word->Selection->{Text};

    if ($str =~ m/Table (\d+)/){
      $tableID = $1;
      $tablefound = 1;
    }
  }
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