Bladder/Uterus prolapse - due to heavy work

Hi, I am a member of the Whole woman forum, 3 months ago I discovered that have cystocele 1 and rectocele 2 prolapse, no significant problems in actual fact did not realise there was a prolapse until got a urine infection and did self examination. Since January 2011 I have read numerous articles about prolapse, surgical procedures, I have read your comments and advice too, been to physio for kegel and try to do them not easy! but I my any wiser! not at all. Today I received a hospital appointment scheduled for the 31 March 2011 for urogyno consultant to do proper tests to which I will go as I need to know exactly what is going on with my prolapse brought on from lifting heavy items over a period of time - I need to understand from a medical view my condition, the options available for me to make a decision that is right for my prolapse, it may not necessarily be surgery.

On this forum I have not read one single prolapse surgical success story it is always about the horrific experiences of surgical intervention, but surely as we know there are risks with every operation some are successful some are not unfortunately. Is there anyone that has had a successful prolapse operation specifically for cystocele and rectocele!
Of course there other non-surgical temporary solutions available and emphisise temporary as prolapse cannot be permanently elivated by exercises, creams, and other methods - so we are back to the surgery subject again.

I am keeping an open mind, well informed about prolapses and of course will update you after my visit to hospital urogyno.

Appreciate your comments

Thank you

Hi Breeze

We are all very patient, along with you.

But we are not patients, which I am sure you understand. We are women using our natural design to optimise the way we go about activities and tasks, in a way that minimises our prolapse symptoms.

I can hear the fear in your voice about the potential for losing your livelihood, your sex life, your lover, your independence and the things you love doing. This is very normal for a woman who experiences prolapse. There is often a lot of self-blame in there as well, so you will need to forgive yourself for anything you may have done to contiribute to your POPs. Life happens with all its stresses and strains. It may be that your concreting had nothing, or little, to do with your POPs. Research tells us that we can carry POPs for years without even knowing it.

You are dealing with enough in your POPs without heaping a lot of blame on yourself. So be as kind to yourself as you would be to others. If you don't think you are a very kind person, then adjusting your thinking about your own expectations of others and yourself, will be an adjustment that you will probably have to make, in order to escape the scalpel. Our own expections can get us into all sorts of strife.

You will need to learn a lot to understand your POPs, accepting that you will have them for life, and working out ways of doing things you want/have to do to accomplish the goals you set. Once you accept that POP is with you for life, and stop looking for magic bullets that will make it go away for good, it is an obvious next step to invest time and effort, and a bit of money for resources, to enable yourself to redesign your physical activities for the long haul. I have found that examining the outcome needed opens up hitherto unthought of possibilities for how to get to the end point of a task. That might mean designing the task from a completely different direction. As a house renovator you would understand this concept well.

I don't think I lift any less in total than I used to lift. I shift less often, and not for prolonged periods, because I recognise that lifting and shifting can be risky for POP and sometimes leave me with symptoms for a couple of days before I get my POPs back to base line, especially if I have to do a job in a hurry, and the movements are uncontrolled.

So I shift things once. I split loads and do more walking instead. I lift differently. My butt is always as far out as I can get it, and my belly relaxed. My thigh muscles are my friends. If I cannot lift using my thigh muscles, then the load is heavy enough to get help. I use the mechanical advantage of , eg a bag trolley, a washing trolley, crowbar and fulcrum, block and tackle, walking furniture on its corners, pushing things along by backing up to them, bending my knees and using my thigh muscles to push backwards, I *never* slouch (or rap my own knuckles if I do). I rarely sit with my back against a seat back. I try to sit cross-legged on the floor/ground every day. That way I get up and down frequently, which strengthens my thigh muscles. I carry loads close to my body. I try to find opportunities to walk, with long, slow strides, in Wholewoman posture, and leaving my trailing foot on the ground for as long as possible. I bellydance for flexibility and body awareness. I am planning on living this way until bedridden, or until I fall off the perch.

I have been doing this for nearly six years now, and it is an evolving story.

Your tools will be your brain and your eyes for reading and learning, your posture, the levers and load spreaders of your body (joints, muscles and bones), your ability to modify your diet , the design of your clothing and the way you use your body for exercise, work and pleasure. Don't worry. Once you get your body organised a bit better and start repositioning your organs I am sure that sex will become more comfortable. You can tell your lover about your POPs when you are ready. Your lover will probably not even notice a physical difference.

Start using the Search box to look for relevant keywords. Get onto Youtube and check out Wholewomaninc channel for excerpt clips from the DVD First Aid for Prolapse. Buy the book Saving the Whole Woman for deeper understanding of POP and the DVD for tips on exercise and a workout for whole body strength.

Keep coming back with questions and comments. It can be a long road, with temporary setbacks along the way, or it might work like magic, depending on where you are starting from.

Cheers

Louise

Hi Breeze

Search the Forums about walking, and check out Christine's channel on Youtube, Wholewomaninc.

Your POP's will not kill you. This *will* make you stronger. It can be very frustrating until you get some progress.

I went to a music festival a couple of weekends ago and sat cross-legged on a small cushion on the ground for about 35 hours in total on the weekend. I also did a lot of brisk walking between venues. At the end of the weekend my POPs were nowhere in site, and my body felt really strong and flexible. I'm 58, BTW.

Louise

Hi Breeze,
Thank you. I totally see where you"re coming from. I am 52, originally from Uk, and in such a similar situation! I have never been so scared. This is worse than the two mastectomy's which I had to go through in the past!

" I don't want to wait for it to get worse - i have a lot of discomfort, I can see part of the bladder just inside my vagina, I am not (yet) incontinent - but I desperately need to know what to do - will this get better if I rest? will I be able to resume by relationships with my new partner (painful at the moment)? will I be able to resume work or will I be restricted by not being able to lift anything?
I am conscious that I am sitting/ standing/ lying awkwardly trying to shift the discomfort and dragging feeling. I would welcome any tips/time frames/exercises - to make this better."

Breeze, I have bought 'Saving the Whole Woman' and "First Aid for Prolapse'. And am reading and watching and trying to be positive. It does look helpful.

BUT, Can anyone please explain the technique for Fire Breathing a way which is easier to understand? I don't think I am the only one who is confused. The clip on the video seems to be missing a chunk.

Thank you.

Hi Arya

If you think a bit is missing out of your video, contact the Wholewoman Store and ask for a replacement. Perhaps I should have another look at mine and see if mine is complete. Then I might be able to help you decipher it. I am not heavily into firebreathing, so it will do me good to check the DVD.

Louise

Hi Arya (love that name!)

There is nothing missing from the DVD. The firebreathing is thoroughly explained in the Dictionary of Movements - located in a separate section of the DVD.

I really can't explain it better than in the book and DVD. Many women need to watch the instructions several times before understanding.

I'm sure you will do fine.

Christine

Hi Arya and Breeze

Last August ( aged 46) I had a similar panic to what you are experiencing. I thought I could 'see part of the bladder, just inside, ( or often just outside) my vagina'. I couldn't of course,it was a little bulge in my vaginal wall caused by a minor prolapse of my urethra which had, when I thought about it, probably been coming on since my first birth fifteen years ago. I panicked, and thought my insides were about to fall out, and then I started studying and by my second GPs visit realised I understood a lot more about it than my GP. I realised that it couldn't possibly get dramatically worse if I paid attention to my posture and that incontinence is virtually unheard of with prolapse

Six months later, I do everything I did before except slouch, lift very heavy weights or wear tight jeans. I don't think I could go back to my old posture if I tried because my muscles have adjusted to something much more natural for a woman. ( It felt anything but easy and natural at first!) The bulge is smaller, ( a small grape rather than a large one) and mostly inside. It now strikes me as extraordinary that I let a grape sized bulge frighten me so much. I was frightened by all the gruesome images I found on the internet, and by my GPs vague but alarming assertion that it would 'get worse'. Well it hasn't, it's got a good bit better. Perhpas if I'd gone on lifting heavy weights, sucking my stomach in and wearing heels and tight clothes it would have done. If I'd carried on doing stupid abdominal exercises and kegels as recommended by my P.T. it would have done.

Christine's research takes a bit of getting your head around, and I was very sceptical at first that she could be right and conventional medical training on prolapse could be wrong - hence my user name. However, the more posts I read, and the more I put what I learned into practice, the more I realised the beautifully simple truth that we women are very well designed to survive childbirth and vigorous lives and that prolapse resulting from childbirth injuries or lifestyle can always be controlled and very often improved.

Please ask as many questions as you like in these forums, I was helped so much by women who'd been doing it for years, and who were in a position to encourage me.

All the very best

Doubtful

What a beautiful post!

Hi Breeze

I can see that you are impatient to see improvement and that you would do anything to make improvement happen. I think it is a bit like learning a musical instrument. You can practise like a mad thing, but doing four hours practice a day is not going to make your learn any faster than doing 4 x 15 minutes a day in the initial stages. I think they call it muscle memory. Most of it goes on in your head, not the body parts in question. It is as if your brain has to get your whole body reorganised, so it just takes a bit of time to become easy. In several weeks time you will not understand how it could initially have been so hard.

Also, your muscles are used to a certain configuration, so it will take some time for some of them to be used more , while some are used less. The angles change subtly. It is like watching a lamb learning to stand and walk. They get some of the way and fall down, and try again and again until they get the whole body in the right arrangement at the same time, then if they fall down, are able to repeat it. Then they have to learn to walk from the mother's nose, down her side to find her udder. She will help by walking forward of course, but the lamb still has to get there and find the teat and get her mouth around it. It is awesome to see how quickly they learn, but they are just hopeless for the first 15-30 minutes.

So be gentle on yourself little lamb, while your brain learns what to do.

The sore back might be several things. It could be stretching of the ligament that runs down the front of your spine, or that you are unconsciously trying to lift your tailbone by contracting your back muscles. It could also be that your rectus abdominus muscles are not used to being stretched right out, so you are having to contract your back muscles to get your spine the right shape. Strengthening them with leg lifts will enable them to stretch out further. Your upper body has to get used to being stronger too, or it doesn't have the strength to hold itself erect with the weight of the chest hanging off the front of the body. That is why there is so much arm work needed. It is also possible that your whole spine is saying, "This is not what I used to do. This must be wrong", and your spinal musculature is fighting it. don't worry, like the beginner musician your body will eventually 'get it'.

Wholewoman is not about, "do the exercises and see miraculous results". It is about changing the whole way you use your body to move in space and do tasks.

MeMyselfandI drew our attention a long time ago to Checkarama, obsessive checking of your vulva for positive changes. If you find yourself doing Checkarama every day or more often you might have to limit yourself to having a feel or a look only once a week, or you will just get discouraged because you cannot see any progress. Checkerama doesn't make it get better quicker.

It is more likely that one day you will realise that you do not feel POPpy at until lunchtime, then a month or so later you will realise that it is 3pm. Progress kind of sneaks up on you. Then you have a temporary setback and think you have stuffed up completely and have to crawl back to the gyn and beg for surgery. Then you are careful, or find something that has caused it, you do something about it, and it gets better again in a few days.

Be gentle on yourself, and be patient. I promise it will get easier.

Louise

Hi Breeze

None of this is medical advice of course, just telling you what worked for me when I was at your stage.

Urogynaecologists

They do exist in the UK. I was told there would be a five month wait to see one. It made me feel frantic. Now I am thankful for the NHS and healthcare rationing because it gave me time to trawl the internet and read their professional literature and periodicals/ forums ( i.e. not the sales pitch they offer to women on their websites or hospital leaflets for women about a 'little repair'.) Among themselves, they admit time and again that vaginal repairs are 'challenging' and that there is very little evidence of long term success. One even joked in a professional forum that if women will garden and lift their toddlers, how can they be surprised when their repairs suddenly give way. I couldn't live with that kind of fear every time I was active. I'm not anti conventional medicine at all, but this whole specialism seems to be based on trying to cut and sew something that is at the core of our active and sexual lives and does not take kindly to begin weakened/ distorted by surgery. So I took my name off the waiting list and decided to see what would happen if I trusted Christine's research and my own body for a year.

Walking

I walk a lot in posture, say 3-4 miles a day. If I need to carry stuff, I put it in a little rucksack. Walking keeps me fit, relieves tension and makes my grape higher. (I've decided to stick with the fruit analogy - so much friendlier than a bulge.) Lots of people on these forums report how walking really improves symptoms.

Sitting

In private, I sit cross legged whenever I can for paperwork, the computer, cooking etc. I do it pullled up into posture. It's tiring at first but becomes second nature. It's brilliant for POP. In public, sitting up straight on the front of your chair is also good.

Avoid constipation

Lots of advice here about diet. I think I overdid the fruit and veg at first and always felt bloated, but you learn to work with your body/ adjust things.

Resting

Try to watch tv/ read/ sew etc cross legged in the evenings. When this gets tiring,go for a walk, do some stretches or lie down on your side on the sofa. It gets much less tiring as your body adjusts, but when you feel the need to vegetate, why not evict everyone else from the sofa and lie down in front of some bad telly?

Read lots on these forums, but also forget about your grape, olive, walnut, orange ( or banana) whenever you can. I've learned an incredible amount here, but also found myself getting obsessed/ fed up with the whole thing at times. A few weaks ago I found myself wanting to scream 'I am not a wholefood health freak earth mother and I hate this whole business. ' And I went out with the girls in high heels and ate a very rich meal and drank far too much and came home and ate some chocolate. We're all human and all have more important things do do with our lives than obsess about the fruit situation in our fannies. The thing is, we can cheat, and fall off the wagon, and maybe have some setbacks ( these come anyway) but feel secure in the knowledge that nothing can get dramatically worse, and everything is probable going to improve, as long as we're generally holding our bodies the way nature intended, and not trusting to a scalpel and a new theory to improve them.

Hope some of this is some help.

All the very best.

Doubtful

Hi Breeze
I discovered a cistocele and rectocele over 2 years ago. I'm a carpenter. I do find I have to be much more careful these days, and I try to get labourers to help with any heavy lifting.

Like you and so many others, I panicked terribly when I first discovered it. And I've just logged on again today after months of absence. But it's so reassuring to keep reading people's experiences. It's also true in my case that it seems to come and go. When it comes back more strongly, that reminds me to do some excercises.

I also discover so many other women who seem to have prolapsed bladders or rectums and just live with it! Hopefully the pain will go away with time.
Good luck
xxx

Hi Doubtful,
Thank you so much for that post. It is so very down to earth, so positive and gives me hope.
Arya

Hi Everyone,
I realised I had prolapsed about 5 weeks ago, but have had no proper diagnosis as yet. The response of my GP when she agreed that I had prolapsed was "I don't recommend surgery unless it's chaffing on your legs". Last week I had to 'demand' that I get to see a consultant in order that I know exactly what I am dealing with. I saw a phsio on Fri, she wasn't able to tell me anything,; she did not examine me/check me out either, she simply told me to do 'Kegels' lying down. Which I did and some Fire Breathing too which I've been doing for a fortnight or so (since the book and DVD arrived - Thank you Christine) But I am not sure I am doing the Fire Breathing correctly; when we
"contract the abdominal muscles in and up in all directions".
should we tighten the 'back passage' muscles too? How does one know if the abdominal wall is "hollow, narrow and pulled up"?
Yesterday, Saturday I awoke with a painful sensation on the right of my lower back. By mid-afternoon i had developed excruciating pain centered around my coccyx and was only just able to walk and then get out of my car. (I had to return home from a 3 hour consultation with a really attentive, compassionate Homeopath who prescribed mr Sepia) i had to take a prescription pain-killer because it was so bad. I get no relief from lying down (tho that is what I am doing now) or sitting; there is no way I can sit cross legged at the moment! Getting up is excruciating, as is walking - the pain is partially down my right leg tho this is not the same as the sciatica I had once before; on the left. I cannot get any relief and feel totally incapacitated. I am used to being very active and 'doing everything'.
Has anyone else experienced the similar pain? I have read that some women have pain in this area tho medics often deny this happens. Does anyone know what I should do? Will it go away with bed-rest? I am in bed because I cannot do anything else - walking to the loo (and especially getting off the loo), making a cup of tea is a major feat!!!!! I live alone so it,s a bit scary on top of the prolapse.........
Arya

in my tailbone before starting wholewoman work- it was nerve pain, like what you describe. Probably something is pinching in there and that is why the pain is running down your legs-
It could be your lower spine and you are just feeling it in your tailbone (referral pain).

have you tried:
1. apply ice packs (not just to the area that hurts- an ice bath would be perfect for this)
2. apply heat packs
3. lie on your back, put your feet in the air, wrap a towel around your feet, grasp in hands- stretch your legs by pulling down on the towel
4. apply pressure to your tailbone or perineum by sitting on a tennis ball
5. deep massage to your gluteals
6 elbows and knees position
7. massage around your tailbone through your vagina
8. look up trigger points on the web, work the trigger points in that area
9. take a deep water bath, go in the ocean, pool, etc
10. stretch your whole body (like the sun salutation stretches from yoga)
11. rest

Arya, you are the first one I've ever heard of with the same connection with the tailbone and prolapse. It makes sense to me that its all inter-related. In my case I have a past tailbone injury and discovered my prolapse because of pain in my groin which I had surgery on last September. Now that pain is back. I'm a mess.... I'm so sorry you're going through all this too, though. It may be a long journey for both of us, but I do think the two issues may be related or at least aggravate each other! I'm going to try the gentler dvd Christine just came up with. With my knee, the original ballet workout is too hard. (I wish, too, it was slower paced cause hard to get the form down). Fun, but not easy for those of us who are gimps like me anyway. I love it, though and hope to get there at some point. I have some internal spring cleaning to do, too. Take care and hope its getting better!!! Please keep me posted.

This is encouraging to me too Alemama! Thank you!

Hi Alemama,
Many thanks for those suggestions. I should find something there which will help.
Many thanks.
Arya

Hi Lauren,
Yes, a long journey, I agree. I asked the Universe at the end of 2010 that I should learn to just 'be' and not constantly be a 'doer'. We should be careful what we ask for!
I look forward to the new DVD. Oh for a 'class' following the original workout in my locality. I live in Ireland tho' so that's a no-no!
Thank you for sharing. Likewise keep me posted.
Take care and all the best.