After numerous trips to the doctor, telling them time and time again, this just does not feel ‘normal’, It’s not how my friends tell me they feel, something definitely feels wrong down there. The doctor casually explains to me ‘oh yes you have a degree of prolapse, don’t worry you can have surgery to fix it’.
I leave the doctors and burst into tears. I don’t think my son has ever made me cry like this, but my vagina, my vagina has made me cry on a daily basis since his birth.
A month later I see a consultant at a big London teaching hospital. I am told to stand up. I obligingly stand and she shoves two fingers up me and tells me to squeeze. ‘Well’ she says, ‘you have no pelvic floor to speak of, so you had better sort that out’. She goes on to tell me that breastfeeding destroys women’s bodies and I’m left feeling 100% torn between my own body and how I choose to feed my baby.
Why did this happen to me? His birth was straightforward, quick even, no instrumental delivery, none of the ‘risk’ factors I have subsequently read about. But it has happened. Birth has damaged me. Birth has left me unable to think about anything else but the inner workings of my pelvic organs and I am obsessed. I feel like I have a permanent visual of my own vagina etched onto my brain when I really should be concentrating on raising a baby.
I am eventually given physiotherapy and it is an amazing thing. I learn to love and respect my body again as my physio teaches me all about what has happened. I have been damaged. My muscles have been bruised and broken by hours of pushing a baby out of my body, but it can heal to a point and it does.
I spend months squeezing and training my muscles to work properly again. I’m not the same as I was but I learn to live with the changes that have happened. I become aware of my body in a way I never was before. I feel genuinely positive for the first time in months.
Now, almost 6 years later, I feel grateful & lucky. Grateful, for the Mother on the end of the phone, forever just listening to detailed descriptions of my vagina. Grateful, to my doctor friend who reassured me that this is common and happens to 50% of women, and who still now checks in on me & my broken body. Grateful, to my German experience with the birth of my second child and the free government funded pelvic floor recovery as standard after birth.
However, I am also angry. Angry that women often have to push, shove and shout their way to the help they need. That it is accepted that we will feel a degree of pain or suffering or uncomfortable ‘this, that and whatever’.
And I am still obsessed with my vagina.
