The pelvic floor is a problem

I was settling down I sat at one of the airport activity tables with high chairs and electrical outlets at my flight gate, waiting for the boarding agent to announce, when I felt a storm gathering at the top of my cheek. This was my last trip after being away from home on a book tour in May. Over the past couple of weeks, I haven’t left my chair much, due to all the publishing, podcasting, writing, and nervous scrolling involved. But I transitioned well from plane to hotel to bookstore. I even made a point of walking to the libraries from the hotels and back, to indulge in a kind of Walt Whitman fantasy.

But now, at the last minute, alarm bells went off. The pain felt as if I had taken a hard hit to my tailbone, as I once did after jumping into an inner tube and landing face first in heavy snow. But there was no incident to which we could attribute the pain. He arrived unblocked. Now not only was sitting painful, as I faced two hours of forced sitting, but the pain was increasing with every minute.

I spent the flight lurching forward in my seat, shifting weight all the way onto one leg, and rocking back and forth as much as I could without looking like I was having a religious hallucination. By the time I had to stand, it was all I could do not to scream—as bad as the pain was while sitting, standing sent a radical guitar solo through my coccyx.

At the time, I was about four months away from giving birth to my first child, and I had a happy recovery, all things considered. I had pelvic muscles of steel, thanks to lifting heavy weights for more than a decade, a practice I continued until two weeks before giving birth. I’ve only been back to lifting weights for a couple of months – deadlifts, squats, bench, overhead press, a few rows here and there or pull-downs – but everything has been going well.

At first I thought the pain would go away as quickly and mysteriously as it did. I knew that while the body goes through a process of relaxing and expanding in preparation for birth, it slowly recompresses itself over the course of several months after the baby is born. I thought maybe my sudden fortitude had caused my body to heal so badly, like in the picture Rookie of the year. I started doing stretches I found online to try to loosen up my bones again — placing the ankle over the knee and pulling the knee toward the chest; Sit upright with legs on the floor at right angles; The knees crossed over each other like an overzealous lotus position. Again, it seemed to help a little, but the pain continued, and got worse enough to make me cry every time I tried to sit for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem, because sitting was, in a sense, my livelihood—as a writer, I couldn’t write down words or read unless I could stay still. Eventually, after weeks of lying at home, I made an appointment with a physical therapist, who, after hearing about my problems, referred me to a pelvic floor specialist.

Tub floors are Not the body part I grew up hearing about. It wasn’t long before I had a pelvic floor incident in which I learned that we all have one – the elderly, children, women and men. Most people’s familiarity with pelvic floor activity extends only to so-called “Kegel exercises,” an almost mystical clenching movement that women are encouraged to practice in order to become good at sex and, more erroneously, to force a baby out of the birth canal. But Kegel exercises only capture one small aspect of what the pelvic floor is capable of.