I was staying In one of those sports tables at the airport with high chairs and electrical outlets at the gate of my plane, waiting for the agent to announce boarding, when I felt the storm of the apex of my cheeks. This was my last flight after being far and away from home on a book tour in May. For the past two weeks, I haven’t left my post much, because of this post, podcasting, writing, and researching, bulletproof research that includes a book. But I was fine with the flight and hotel to the book. I even make a point of going to bookstores from the hotels and back, to indulge in some kind of Walt Whitma-Esque Fantasy.
But now, at the last minute, the alarm bells were going off. The pain felt like I took a hard hit on my tailbone, like I did after jumping out of the indoor snow and ass first. But there is no incident to register this pain. It had arrived and was not working. And now not only was I sitting down as I faced two hours of forced labor, but the pain was increasing by the minute.
I spent the flight leaning forward in my seat, weight shifted all the way to one leg, rocking back and forth as much as possible without looking like I was having a religious hallucination. When I had to stand up, it was all I could do not to squeeze – as bad as the pain was sitting down, standing up sent a thud to my coccyx.
At the time, I was almost four months postpartum from delivering my first child, and she was a delightfully modest, all things considered. I had iron pelvic muscles, thanks to a decade of lifting heavy weights, a habit I continued until two weeks before giving birth. I was back to lifting for a few months – squats, squats, bench, more press, here and there some rows or a good lat pull.
At first I thought that maybe the pain would disappear so quickly and mysteriously. I knew that, just as the body goes through the growing and growing process to get ready for birth, it regroups a little in the months after the baby is born. I thought that maybe my sudden plea would heal my body a lot, like in the beginning Rookie of the year. I started doing things I found online to try to pull my bones above and-ankle falling over the knee and knee pulled into the chest; Sitting straight with the cheap legs down on the right side; the knees fall on each other like a lotus anlesh. Again, it seemed to help a little, but the pain persisted, and got worse enough to make me scream every time I tried to sit for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem, because living like that is, in a way, my life – as a writer, I couldn’t get the words down or read unless I was there. Finally, after weeks of lying around the house, I made a deal with a physical therapist, who heard about my problems, and referred me to a pelvic floor massage.
Pelvic floor Not the body part I grew up with. And it wasn’t long before the pelvic floor pain episode I read all of us adults, children, women, men. Many people’s familiarity with pelvic floor ack work extends to “Kegels,” strange movements that women are encouraged to practice in order to have good sex, and to have a baby outside of the birth canal. But kegels capture only one small aspect of what the pelvic floor is doing.
