I was dealing with I was sitting at one of those airport activity tables with the high stools and power outlets at the gate of my flight, waiting for the agent to announce boarding, when I felt a storm forming on the tops of my butt cheeks. This was my last flight after being away from home on a book tour in May. For the past two weeks, due to all the posting, podcasting, writing, and stressful, nervous scrolling of a book release, I haven’t left my chair. But I went from the plane to the hotel to the bookstore just fine. I had even decided to walk from the hotel to the bookstore and back to enjoy some kind of Walt Whitman-like fantasy.
But now, at the last moment, alarm bells started ringing. The pain felt as if I had hit my tailbone hard, as I once did after jumping into an inner tube and landing face-first on hard snow. But no such incident occurred which could be attributed to the pain. It had come without permission. And now not only was it painful to sit as I was forced to essentially sit for two hours, but the pain was increasing with each passing minute.
I took off, leaning forward in my seat, putting all my weight on one leg, moving it back and forth as hard as I could without looking like I was experiencing some religious hallucination. By the time I had to stand up, it was all I could do to keep from screaming – as bad as the pain was from sitting down, standing up sent a radical guitar solo through my coccyx.
At the time, I was about four months after giving birth to my first child, and I was blissfully recovered, all things considered. My pelvic muscles had become strong from lifting heavy weights for more than a decade, a practice I continued until two weeks before giving birth. I’d only been back into lifting for a few months – deadlifts, squats, benches, overhead presses, a few rows or lat pull-downs here and there – but everything was going well.
At first I thought that perhaps the pain would disappear just as quickly and mysteriously as it had come. I knew that, just as the body goes through a process of relaxing and expanding to prepare for birth, it slowly contracts itself again over the several months after childbirth. I felt that perhaps my sudden sedentary nature had strained my body too much, as Rookie of the Year. I started doing stretches to try to separate my bones again that I found online – crossing the ankle over the knee and pulling the knee up to the chest; Sitting straight with legs extended at right angles to the floor; The knees are crossed over each other like a highly enthusiastic lotus posture. Then, this seemed to provide some relief, but the pain persisted, and got so bad that I started screaming whenever I tried to sit for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem, because sitting was, in some ways, my livelihood – as a writer, I couldn’t write or read words until I was quiet. Finally, after lying at home for several weeks, I made an appointment with a physiotherapist who, after hearing about my problems, referred me to a pelvic floor specialist.
pelvic floor is Not the body part I grew up hearing about. And long before I had my own pelvic floor episode I learned that we all have one – old people, children, women, men. Most people’s familiarity with pelvic floor activity extends only to “Kegels,” a semimysterious recreational motion that women are encouraged to practice to get good at sex and, more inaccurately, to get the baby out of the birth canal. But Kegels capture only a small aspect of what the pelvic floor is capable of doing.