🇺🇸 I'll Be Right Back, a parenting newsletter, issue 35

Welcome to I’ll Be Right Back, a parenting newsletter that combines the fear-mongering of BabyCenter with the practical tips of a vegan model’s parenting blog.

This is issue 35, published January 20, 2017. In honor of Donald Trump's inauguration, I have worked with my friend Emily Gould to publish 2,000+ words about our vaginas. This...interview is running in both of our newsletters today. Subscribe to hers, Can't complain, here.
 

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Emily Gould: Laura, I’m just going to start interviewing you about it.

When did it start? Did you think it was a UTI? What did it feel like? Had you ever experienced anything like it before? What did you do?

Laura Hazard Owen: So for me it started immediately, as soon as he was born. My C-section recovery with Alice was pretty great, which I guess was unusual, but I'd heard so many horror stories about them. In comparison, I had heard very few horror stories about the after-effects of vaginal births. Everyone just kept saying how much easier the recovery was, so I was expecting pretty good things when I went for the VBAC.

I didn't push for that long, but I could not believe how bad my vagina felt after giving birth. There are very few moments in my life where I have felt I wasn't prepared for something, because I Googled every single possible pregnancy fear, and I have super close friends who I had talked about labor with a ton. But I wasn't prepared for this.

I had a bunch of tearing and got stitches, so this part I was prepared for, and gradually all of it went away except that I felt like — and this is really gross, I actually hate typing it a lot — like there was kind of a bulge down there, like a tampon was falling out. It was really annoying when I was walking for a long time, and I had to pee all the time. It didn’t hurt, it just felt weird.

I have turned into an extremely good internet doctor, so I self-diagnosed that it was a bladder prolapse but really hoped it wasn't because everything I could find about that on the internet was just sort of disgusting and depressing. Like, you can have surgery, but that of course isn't a perfect solution because the recovery from it might be roughly akin to recovery from a vaginal birth, or you can get this thing called a pessary to try to hold everything up down there — and when I Google imaged pessary I wanted to cry. It was this really, really ugly, peach-colored, absolutely disgusting and the least sexy possible looking, like, rubber...grossness.

Or you can learn to live with it. And I just felt so old and I couldn't believe it, because I had honestly sort of prided myself on having a great vagina.

I told my OB at my 6-week postpartum appointment, "I think I have a prolapse," and I hoped she'd say no. Instead she said "Yes, it looks like you do," but she didn't seem to be freaking out about it nearly as much as I was or frankly thought she should be. She said it would get better with time and was like "You know it looks totally normal from the outside, right?"

But if you had a tampon falling out feeling all the time, you would want to get it fixed, wouldn't you? OR this other thing I'd been hearing about on my Cambridge moms Facebook group was pelvic floor therapy, which I'd never heard of, but it seemed like the best option. I found a recommended place and made an appointment and then realized that it was going to be too far away for me to get to regularly and definitely too inconvenient once I was no longer on maternity leave. So, I found a second recommended place that was much closer, and I emailed their pelvic floor person, Anna, and she miraculously had an opening...slot...for a new patient. And she sounded so nice.

Okay, so now you go: What happened? You figured it out pretty long after having the baby, right? What was the feeling and what did you do?

Emily: Thank you for bravely typing that. I am so sorry you had to type it, and also sorry you had to experience it!!

Well, here's the thing: I don't know if I can even draw a straight line between my pelvic situation and pushing a baby out of my vagina. I mean, I'm sure it didn't HELP. But the weird thing for me was that I'd experienced this before, long before ever being pregnant.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was really depressed and under a ton of stress (breakup, moving, job implosion, unemployment after crazy overemployment — a pretty well-documented-by-me period, though I don't think I've written about this aspect of it before) and one of the things that happened was that I had, I thought, a UTI that just wouldn't go away. Weirdly, though, my urine always came up clean, but my bumbling GP kept prescribing me antibiotics anyway. After maybe a month of blinding constant pain, I saw a urologist, who sent me to a gynecologist, who did a pelvic sonogram which showed nothing amiss. She diagnosed me with "interstitial cystitis," which as far as I can tell just means "mystery bladder pain."

I googled this and felt the same total despair you describe; it's one of those diseases that has message boards full of people trading information about all kinds of quackery because no one has any real answers, and everyone is miserable and desperate enough to try anything. There's a drug for it that only works in some small percentage of cases and also makes you fart, and you have to take it several times a day. I decided not to do that. Instead I basically did nothing. Unrelatedly, I went on Zoloft. Gradually — so gradually I didn't really notice what was happening, or connect it to anything I was doing or not doing — the pain went away. I forgot all about it. Whatever it had been, I didn't have it anymore, so who cares that I never figured out what it was?

Cut to: almost a decade later, more than a year after my uneventful vaginal delivery, a week after Donald Trump was elected President. I woke up and the pain was back like it had never left. It's a maddeningly hard pain to describe — "like a UTI" only probably does it for people who've had a really bad one. It's almost like a muscle ache or menstrual cramps but not in your uterus? It's profoundly irritating, the kind of pain that immediately transforms your mood because you can't really think about anything except the pain. I wanted to reach inside my body and pull the offending organ out, except of course I wasn't sure exactly what I'd be yanking. Something in the dead center of my lower abdomen, something that usually doesn't register any sensation, good or bad.

I went to the doctor immediately. I have a GP I love and trust now, thank goodness, and she sent me to get a sonogram (again, nothing) but also said I should try physical therapy. I google and pick the pelvic floor PT specialist closest to me who has the best Yelp reviews (how are we actually supposed to pick doctors?! I have no idea) and make an appointment for as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I quit coffee and start taking turmeric and aloe pills (which I'm pretty sure do nothing) and get acupuncture a bunch of times, which feels nice but also ... well who knows.  

After the first pelvic floor PT appointment -- which I will describe in greater detail after you describe what yours is like, but long story short the therapist sticks her finger in my vagina and tries to loosen up my muscles from inside by poking and prodding very specific areas, like a deep tissue massage but, you know, vaginal — I feel so much better.  Not just physically, but also I feel validated because this woman literally sees people in my situation (which had seemed so bizarre) all day.

"Have you been under a lot of stress lately?" she asks, and I respond that I think everyone in the country has been under a lot of stress lately.  She says that the muscles of my pelvic floor are both weak and tight, and that so are the muscles of my inner and outer thighs and hip abductors, and that stretching and strengthening those muscles will keep my pelvic floor from trying to do the work they're supposed to do, which is part of what's freaking my bladder out. She says the bladder is smooth muscle and I can't control it, but I can control the other stuff, which can "teach" the bladder not to be freaked out. I immediately believe everything she says and set up a small shrine in my mind dedicated to venerating her.

I think childbirth plus Trump plus getting hit by a car probably is the cause? But I'm not a doctor, though I have googled this a LOT.

Laura: 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," so that's not great. Like definitely the least fair thing is we keep getting older.

But whatever at least we have our pelvic floor therapists. First of all, mine is just so nice. One of the nice things about going to see someone who specializes in this is that you're not going to get there and have them be like "well, this is disgusting."

Her name is Anna, she's roughly my age, and she's very chill, and a lot of the "what the fuck" feeling I have had dissipates when I'm with her. Also, insurance pays for the appointments — probably because my insurance covers general physical therapy, and that's how this is billed; how much do you want to bet that if it was specified as vagina therapy they would be like NO FUCKING WAY we are not covering that it's your own fault you got pregnant and actually also that you have a vagina, gross.

So mostly she's had me do Kegels, but guess what. Now I have a vagina zapper. That's right. The actual name for it I think is electrostimulation — not the thing that will immediately turn up if you Google it, which is some possibly dangerous sex enhancement, but I got this little machine that is like a rectangular box about the size of a phone.

If it were being used for its normal physical therapy use, would have little electrode things hooked up to it and would zap muscles on, like, your leg. But instead it's attached to a, well, a vaginal probe that is roughly as big as a tampon. An electric, plastic-and-metal tampon. So normal! You put it in and turn it on and essentially do Kegels with it while your vagina gets very lightly and painlessly zapped. The point is that it retrains your brain to work with your muscles. I think it probably relates back to what you mentioned about teaching the bladder not to freak out.

I have been doing it for about three weeks now, and it's helping; I can't say quite how, but my vagina is starting to feel like mine again. I do it for ten minutes every night. Sometimes Kev's still at work, but if he's there I just use it on the couch with a blanket over me while we watch TV. It's still sort of embarrassing, but then I was like, well, he's seen me pump, this is just another machine for him to be slightly mystified by. How much have you talked about this stuff with Keith, btw?

The little machine was covered by my insurance, but the tampon-like probe wasn't, because, as previously mentioned, it relates to vaginas. It was $45 and my pelvic floor therapist helped me order it separately. It came from Taiwan.

Emily: Oh wow. I want a Taiwanese vagina probe!  At least it wasn't, like, 400 uninsured dollars. I can imagine it being that. I read this Elle piece where the woman's PT recommended a specific vibrator that could be repurposed to hit her trigger spot.

Your email is so lol. It is very unfair that on top of having to experience these things there is that layer of shame that's just unavoidable when having vagina problems. I also recently went to an ENT for the first time ever and I told EVERYONE about it, sort of to compensate for not feeling comfortable discussing my weekly hour lying on a table with a stranger's hand in my vagina and its impact on my health, life and schedule.  Like, I took joy in describing the gory details of the balloon-in-sinus surgery I might have, just because I could. I also finally understand old people sitting around discussing their various ailments. Because: we are them. 💀 💀 💀

This: "a lot of the 'what the fuck' feeling I have had dissipates when I'm with her" is exactly how I feel too.

How is it now? Mine has been much better. Life without coffee is pretty fucking drab though.

I have not really gone in-depth about it with Keith. Sometimes when I'm feeling bad I'll say "I have my thing" so that he knows there's a reason I'm being bitchier than usual, besides life. Luckily I have not really noticed pain during p-in-v sex, which it sort of seems like I should have but whatever! (It does hurt when the PT is stabbing her finger around trying to unknot the muscles in there, but I guess that is a different situation).  The PT once forgot I was not a pain-during-sex patient and asked me to rate my most recent sexual experience on a scale of one to ten (meaning painwise) and I wasn't sure what she meant and I was like "in terms of...quality?" (I did tell her a rating)

The sitting on the couch with pump or vagina probe moments would betoken "all the spark is gone" if our relationships were taking place on premium cable, but luckily they are taking place in reality, it's not like THE MOST romantic thing but it's also nbd, we are all human.
 

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These 3 links are really worth reading if you want to know more about this stuff or think you may have pelvic floor problems.

— "I would expect the same kind of treatment as a guy who tears his ACL or has prostate cancer."

— "So, the brain’s like, “This [issue] is not life-threatening. So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to actually take some of my nerve input away."

— "She gave me my life back."
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