#102, I got my broken vagina fixed (Part I)

The first time Trump was inaugurated, January 20, 2017, Emily Gould and I celebrated by writing about the state of our broken vaginas. Eight years (plus one week) later, I marked the second inauguration by having my broken vagina fixed with surgery.

It took me a very long time, and some mental ~adjustment~, to get to this point. Two presidencies of time! The child whose birth maybe caused my prolapse is now 8, his older sister is 11, and his younger sister just turned 5. I’ve been a mom for a little more than a decade and for most of that time my pelvic floor was busted.

My official diagnosis was a prolapsed bladder — it’s a cystocele — plus stress urinary incontinence, which means I peed when I ran or jumped or coughed. I had to pee all the time, and I could always feel the bulge that was my bladder falling down from where it was supposed to be. Those things became 1000% part of my normal life. I got pregnant again in 2019 and had my third child in 2020; weirdly, this did not make the prolapse worse. Then we had the pandemic, as you might remember!

Through this all, my options were the same as I wrote to Emily back in January 2017: To do nothing; to do pelvic floor PT; to try a pessary; or to get surgery to fix the prolapse. But one thing changed a lot in that time: Myself! Me!

In 2017, I wrote, “I think the somewhat disheartening part of all of this is that there are so many factors that can be blamed, but one of them really might be ‘just getting older.’” I was 32 when I wrote that! I read it over now and I just want to slap myself! 32! I was so young. And I’m 40 now and that is also so young. Somehow in the span of the 8 years I got it together and realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being all “womp womp” about this, and also I was able to stop being bashfully accepting of it. Maybe when I was 32 I was too young to do it. (Regardless, it’s recommended that you not get the surgery until you’re done having kids, which makes sense, and at 32, I wasn’t done.)

Also, while pelvic floor PT was not unhelpful, you can’t Kegel your bladder back into place. I’m not saying Kegels are useless? (Unless…?) But. “Oh, well, if you just did one million Kegels a day for the rest of your life, you could move entire organs up literal centimeters!” is a concept that, the more I thought about it, felt way too similar to, e.g., breastfeeding pressure — an “if you want it enough, you can do it, just pump every two hours” thing that was in fact insane. Plus we don’t tell people to fix their broken arm by trying harder.

In the next parts of this, I will tell you about choosing a surgeon and all of those things and about the surgery itself (which I am so, so glad I had) and the recovery so far. But: I’ll only tell you about it if you want! I’m pausing here so you can unsubscribe now if you are one of the many people who signed up for my newsletter automatically via the recommendation from another Substack, assume it contains advice about writing books, and do not realize it is actually, for the near to mid term, about my vagina.

And the other thing is that I have to pick up the kids.