The pelvic floor is a problem

I was paying At one of those airport activity desks with high stools and power outlets at my flight gate, I was waiting for the flight attendant to announce when I felt a storm on the tip 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, I haven’t left my chair much because of all the posts, podcasts, writing, and nervous, nervous scrolling that publishing a book involves. But I had gone from the plane to the hotel to the bookstore very well. I even decided to go from hotels to bookstores and back to indulge in some kind of Walt Whitman fantasy.

But now, at the last moment, the alarm sounded. The pain felt like I had been hit hard on my tailbone, as I had once done after jumping on an inner tube and landing face first on hard snow. But there was no incident to which we could attribute the pain. It had arrived unintentionally. And now not only was it painful to sit because I was forced to sit for two hours, but the pain was getting worse by the minute.

I spent the flight forward in my seat, weight shifted all the way onto one leg, rocking back and forth as much as I could without seeming like I was experiencing a religious hallucination. When I had to get up, it was all I could do not to scream – as intense as the pain from sitting was, standing sent a radical guitar solo following me.

At the time, I was about four months out from giving birth to my first baby and, all things considered, I was making a blissful recovery. I had steely pelvic muscles thanks to more than a decade of lifting heavy weights, a workout I continued until two weeks before I gave birth. I had only been back lifting for a few months – deadlifts, squats, bench, overhead press, a few rows or lats here and there – but everything was going well.

At first I thought maybe the pain would disappear just as quickly and mysteriously. I knew that, just as the body goes through a process of loosening and expanding to prepare for birth, it slowly compresses itself in the months after the baby is born. I thought that maybe the sudden inactivity had repaired my body too stiffly rookie of the year I started doing stretches I found on the internet to get my bones apart again. Sit straight with your legs apart on the floor at right angles. Knees are over-crossed like a lotus pose. Again, it seemed to help a little, but the pain persisted, and it got so bad that I cried every time I tried to sit for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem because sitting was, in a way, my livelihood—as a writer, I couldn’t learn or read words unless I could be still. Finally, after weeks of lying at home, I made an appointment with a physical therapist who, after hearing about my problems, referred me to a pelvic floor specialist.

They are the pelvic floor Not the body part I grew up hearing about. And it wasn’t long after my own pelvic floor episode that I realized we all have one – old people, kids, women, men. Most people’s familiarity with pelvic floor activity only extends as far as “kegels,” a pseudo-folk movement that women are encouraged to practice to be good at sex, and more wrongly, to push babies out of the birth canal. But Kegels represent only a small aspect of pelvic floor abilities.