Uterine Prolaps

Body: 

I went for my yearly a couple of weeks ago and my doc informed me that my uterus had dropped and began asking lots of questions about incontinence. Since I think of incontinence as "peeing in your pants" I told him that I don't have that problem anymore. I didn't think to mention that if I laugh or cough too hard then yes, I will leak a little bit. Well, when I got home I had to see for myself what he was talking about and for the first time in my life I actually felt my cervix...its sitting about 1 1/2 inches just inside my vaginal opening. It is completely on the front wall. What does this mean???? Will it fall out? What stage would this be considered? I have been doing kegals since the birth of my 3rd baby 18 months ago. I did notice some pretty aggravating lower back pain about 6 months ago, but I just wrote it off as I was being a baby and needed to lose that extra baby weight I've been carting around. Otherwise, I've had no symptoms. Things are way lower down there, but my husband and I just assumed all was normal and that having babies would do that to a woman.
Mandy

you and your husband are right to assume that this happens to many women after having babies.
when your dr asked about incontinence he may have meant stress-incontinence, which means that when increased pressure (ie, coughing, sneezing) is put on the bladder, urine leaks out. this can happen for many reasons, but since you already know that your uterus is a bit low, I would assume that it *may be related to prolapse.
the pelvic organs are all connected, so a lower uterus can indicate a lower, or malpositioned, bladder as well.
the good news, is that your prolapse sounds extremely mild. I don't know about grading systems, I ignore the numbers since they don't mean much in terms of my daily life. your uterus is not going to fall out anytime soon, and my guess is that you can successfully prevent it from falling out at all!
The posture advocated on this site helps you do that. chances are the way you are currently holding your body places your uterus directly over the vagina (a hole). in the Wholewoman posture, your uterus would be placed directly over the pubic symphysis - a bone. now you tell me, which would you rather have supporting a uterus!
now, kegels, are useful and not. useful for controlling stress incontinence because you can learn to squeeze the muscles at the end of the urethra when you sneeze. this prevents urine from leaking out because you can increase the pressure from below(kegeling) as the pressure increases from above (sneezing). however, its unlikely that all the kegels in the world will reverse a prolapse. those muscles were not designed to reposition pelvic organs. and its also unlikely that kegels will hold prolasped organs in either, even *if* the muscles were strong enough to do that (unlikely since they are oh-so-small), you can't walk around all day maintaining a kegel!
but that's ok, because once you get a hang of the posture (its second nature to me) those muscles automatically tighten because of the way the pelvis is positioned.

so.....I'd say you're in a very good place right now to prevent things from going any further. start by reading up on the faq's here and if you can, order Christine's book (saving the wholewoman, but get the second edition).