The Pelvic Floor Is a Problem

I had settled at one of those airport activity tables with high stools and electrical outlets at the gate of my flight, waiting for the agent to announce boarding, when I felt a storm gathering at the top of my butt. This was my last flight after being away from home on a book tour in May. Over the past couple of weeks, I hadn’t left my chair much, because of all the tense and nervous posting, podcasting, writing, and scrolling that releasing a book entails. But I had gotten from the plane to the hotel to the bookstore just fine. I even made it a point to walk to and from the hotels to bookstores, to indulge in a sort of Walt Whitman fantasy.

But now, at the last moment, the alarm bells ring. The pain was like I had been hit hard in the tailbone, like I had once after jumping in an inner tube and landing butt first on hard snow. But there was no incident to attribute the pain to. He had arrived uninvited. And now, not only did it hurt to sit down when I was facing two hours of mandatory sitting, but the pain was growing by the minute.

I spent the flight forward in my seat, weight shifted entirely to one leg, rocking back and forth as much as I could without looking like I was experiencing a religious hallucination. By the time I had to stand up, it was all I could do not to scream – as bad as the pain was while sitting, standing up sent a sweeping guitar solo through my tailbone.

At that time, I was about four months postpartum after delivering my first baby and, all things considered, I had recovered well. I had pelvic muscles of steel, thanks to more than a decade of lifting heavy weights, a practice I continued until two weeks before giving birth. I had only been back lifting for a few months – deadlifts, squats, bench, bench press, a few rows or lat pulldowns here and there – but everything had been going well.

At first I thought maybe the pain would go away as quickly and mysteriously as it came. I knew that just as the body goes through a process of relaxing and expanding to prepare for birth, it slowly recompacts several months after the baby is born. I thought maybe my sudden sedentary lifestyle had tightened my body too much, as in Rookie of the year. I started doing stretches I found online to try to separate my bones again: ankle crossed over knee and knee pulled toward chest; sitting upright, legs apart on the floor at a right angle; knees crossed like an overzealous lotus pose. Again, this seemed to help a little, but the pain persisted and got bad enough to make me scream every time I tried to sit up for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem, because sitting was, in a sense, my livelihood: as a writer, I couldn’t write words or read unless I could sit still. Finally, after weeks of hanging around the house, I made an appointment with a physical therapist who, after hearing about my issues, referred me to a pelvic floor specialist.

The pelvic floors are It’s not a body part I learned about growing up. And shortly before my own pelvic floor episode, I learned that we all have one: older people, children, women, men. Most people are only familiar with pelvic floor activity as far as “Kegels,” a semi-mystical gripping movement that women are encouraged to do to have good sex, and, incorrectly, to pull a baby out of her birth canal. But Kegels only capture a small aspect of what the pelvic floor is capable of.