little pomegranate seed

This post is not finished, but I feel like I need to post it before I have another baby. I started writing it last summer, but it’s hard. It’s really Part 4 of Bunny’s Birth Story. I’ve been re-reading Parts 1-3 of Bunny’s birth story and am weeping all over again.

I originally debated whether or not to make this password protected because I don’t feel totally comfortable sharing this information with people who know me in real life, but I took out some details and decided not to do that. If you know me in real life and are not a blogger yourself, could you just skip reading this.

I think I may have mentioned going to see a new midwife this spring in one of my sporadic posts. I’m not sure if I mentioned the midwife recommended pelvic floor physical therapy. The OB who stitched me up post-partum had also recommended this, but it was in reference to my lingering incontinence. The midwife recommended it for two very different reasons. One of them was that it might help make labor easier next time around,

It took a while to book someone for after work, and my intitial PT has since left the state. The new PT I’ve been seeing since then is great too, but it was the first PT who really changed my life.

My original PT was V. She’s blonde and perky and engaged to an Alabama state champion football coach (who she just followed south) and not at all what I’d expect a feminist to be, but she is oh-so-empowering. V’s whole thing is about women learning to regain control our pelvic floor. Based on my history, she was so sad that no one had suggested physical therapy to me before.

Anyways, working with her was seriously amazing. She’s been working on helping me overcome the residual trauma from not only the horrifying labor experience, but also just helping me learn to control my body in ways I never have known how to do before. Apparently, I have been living with decreased blood flow to my pelvic floor most likely since adolescence when a string of yeast infections taught my body it’s better to shut down. I know I had a yeast infection the first time I had sex, and it was painful. She says a lot of her clients have a history of yeast infections when they were younger.

At the first session, she had me try to do gradual Kegels, and apparently I have very little control or ability to do so. My homework was to practice diaphragmatic breathing and to do stretches to release some of the muscles around my hips/butt.

At my last session, she was gently manipulating my abdominal and thigh muscles that connect to my pelvic floor muscles, and it felt like a horribly misguided and supremely painful deep tissue massage. She also asked me to try to push her finger out of my vagina. I couldn’t form my muscles to do it. But I am apparently a little better at the Kegel elevators, even though I can’t feel myself doing them. So yes, my awareness and muscle control need a lot of work. My next at-home exercise is to relax my muscles and push. I have learned that my body is fucked, but it’s not in my head. That’s all I needed to have confirmed. It’s liberating.

Working with V is so much better than therapy. She talks through the session to keep me relaxed so she can manipulate my pelvic area without involuntary push-back, and a lot of what she says feels so validating. After I realized how painful gentle stimulation around my uterus was, I told her about how during labor I was feeling clenched up in between contractions. She agreed that this is very likely due to the lack of blood flow to my uterus. After two hours with her, I finally don’t feel like everything that went wrong during Bunny’s birth was my fault. She said she worked with a client who had been a L&D nurse for 15 years and had coached countless women through pushing, but couldn’t do it herself because her body was physically unable to do so. THIS is what I need to hear, not “Are you sure you were never sexually abused or assaulted?” (No, I have not! What the fuck kind of comment is that to ask a woman wrecked from 56 hours of labor?) from my fucking midwife.

V has also been much more helpful for dealing with my chronic back pain (which she says is all related to the pelvic floor issues) than the chiropractor I finally broke down and visited for a bit last year.

The PT that I’ve being seeing regularly since V is also great. She’s less of an activist, though, and less outraged by stories of my history (although she did think the midwife crossed the line). T and I have built a relationship over the last 8 months. She was the one who helped me navigate the OB’s when I had to switch over from the midwives. We sneak peeks at the on call schedule every week which helps me feel more empowered about my birth. I know I like the two OBs on call nights for the week of and after my due date. The doc I don’t like is on call Tuesdays as well as both Sat and Sunday of the weekend after my due date. Fingers crossed, but at least I won’t be surprised.

Anyways, the ultimate reclamation will be Chickadee’s birth, I know. T is confident my body is ready and that it will go well. The point of this post, though, is just to say the pelvic floor physical therapy is amazing and empowering and totally worth it. I still carry around some PTSD related to Bunny’s birth, but I feel so much more in control of my body than I did before.