Newbie with worsening symptoms =(

Hi LifeBlessings

First, I don't do the workout, so I will leave others to help you deal with the results of it. I am sure there will be something that is causing the worsening. I would stop the workout for now and get yourself back to how you were before starting it. Someone who does the workout will post, I am sure, to help you to get it right. Think about the sensations you experience during the workout, and what brings them on. What are the sensations?

Repositioning your pelvic organs is something that has to happen bit by bit. Think of it like trying to swap all the rooms of your house around without actually taking any furniture out in the backyard or onto the landing. You run out of spaces to put things, and it takes a long time.

Your story with tummy and butt tucking could be my story, and I agree that not holding your tummy in is very hard to change. We become used to looking at ourselves in the mirror with a neat, flattish tummy and giving ourselves a pat on the back. It is harder to give yourself a pat on the back for a relaxed, Renaissance-style female belly, with its curves enhanced. However, it doesn't stick out any further when your chest is raised. I am surprised that I cannot see my belly when in WW posture, even though I am overweight and past menopause. It will eventually relax itself almost all the time. When you catch yourself with tummy tucked, focus on the pelvic sensation, then relax your belly and feel the subtle difference in your vulva. This will give you the opposite positive affirmation from the tucked tummy pat on the back.

WW posture helped me to feel comfortable with being female and sexual after decades of being the power woman and tomboy. It was a revelation! Learning bellydance also helped me to become comfortable with my belly, and also has taught me that my body can learn to do different things. It is hard, but my body eventually can learn to do almost anything. And it sure beats getting onto the surgical treadmill!

I am sure you will receive posts from others about the workout.

Louise

Hi LifeBlessings,

Yes, "getting worse" is extremely common when starting the posture. Alemama had this experience as have many others. It seems that when the normally flattened, airless tube of the vagina is held open to intraabdominal pressure by a bulge in one wall, a bulge from the opposite wall soon follows. We have described this as just how the mature vagina "settles out". Cystocele/rectocele with the cervix just above is by far the most common form of prolapse.

I hope you will take the experiences of all these women to heart and know your symptoms will improve in time. I agree with Louise that you might consider putting heavy exercise on hold until you feel your condition stabilize. Your lumbar curve must serve to push your organs forward in order to avoid aggravating your symptoms. You may think you are in WW posture when in fact your alignment is not quite there yet. A common example is sitting crosslegged...if you cannot sit crosslegged without rounding your lower back, that seated position is allowing internal pressures to push your organs backward instead of pinning them into position at the front of your body. It takes time for your hip joints to stretch and your lower spine to naturally expand.

Christine

Ah yes! Looks like you may have just been slapped in the face by your menstrual cycle. I never quite got the hang of remembering the role of my menstrual cycle in how my POPs were feeling. Too late for that now. ;-)

I think that being now 'beyond menopause' is one of the reasons why my POPs are behaving less erratically these days. It is a nice place to be in many respects. I used to find that my whole body was more prone to inflammation and injury in the second half of the cycle, and had to moderate my activities accordingly at that time, and until the flow was lessening each month. It was as if my hormones had a life of their own and were hiding in the shadows, waiting for the opportunity in the latter part of my cycle to trip me up, and have a laugh at my expense. ("Curses!" I would mumble, when I realised that I had been tricked by them yet again! - now that's Freudian, isn't it?)

You have a bit of mileage to go before that, so don't hold your breath!

Anyone who has difficulty making friends with their menstrual cycle needs to join one of the many websites that exist for helping women to focus on the role of the menstrual cycle in their lives, and live accordingly, respecting their body's needs at the time. This is one of my bookmarks, http://www.womensquest.org/CommunitySite/Index (UK-based), and http://www.deannalam.com/ , Deanna L'Am being the author of the lead article in April's edition of The Wholewoman Village Post (US-based).

Louise

Hi Lifeblessings

I can really empathise with you as to begin with the workoout made me feel worse. It doesn't any more, but to be honest, simply walking in the posture and sitting cross legged in the posture has helped me the most.

Time of month can really affect your POP symptoms. It helped me to keep a diary after the first few months. For me they are always bad the first day on my period, then okay for the next six, but it is the week after my period that I really suffer. Each month I get down about it, but now I see a pattern it's less depressing. Second half of the month my symptoms are good and getting better each month, but it seems we women are at the mercy of our cycles sometimes. Idividual women have worse symptoms at different times of month. I glaze over a bit when people explain the hormonal reasons to me, but just keeping track of your own patterns will help you keep them in perspective.

I promise that when you've mastered the posture it's highly unlikely that you could get substantially worse - your pubic bone is there to protect everything. We all tend to fluctuate around a level, whether we are just stabilising, getting some or even substantial reversal. The fluctuations feel like getting worse until you get used to them - but they are nothing to worry about, I promise you.

Doubtful

Hi LifeBlessings

The first thing to remember when managing POP is that it is 'managing', not 'fixing'. Pelvic organ prolapse is simply a malpositioning of pelvic organs caused by damage and stretching of the 3 dimensional fascia that keep them where they should be, the uterus flopped over forwards with a right angle bend at the top of the vagina, a useful anatomical kink, the bladder under the uterus, leaning forwards on the lower front abdominal wall, not backwards against the vagina, and the rectum stretched out long and thin behind the vagina. The only way this can happen when the woman has POP is to rotate these organs forwards and keep them there by allowing the top of the sacrum to come down, and the bottom of the sacrum to move up, and literally locking the organs forward. This is accomplished by raising the chest which moves the lumbar spine forward, which in turn rotates the top of the pelvis forwards and the bottom of the pelvis back. This simple change of balance to a traditional female posture helps the body to keep its organs in place. It also increases the resting volume of the lungs by tightening the respiratory diaphragm, and other healthy structural changes that can improve our physiology.

I measure my personal personal experience of improvement by how many times a day I feel my bladder, or less commonly my rectum, rubbing against my vulva, and how much difficulty I have with bowel emptying. If it is seldom I regard that as excellent. If I feel my rectocele or cystocele many times a day that means I have to change some activities and do some manoeuvre exercises for to reposition these organs. I do also have urge incontinence sometimes. Managing this can be a challenge, and is mostly done by knowing what brings it on, and doing it differently. But it is a sign that my bladder is well forward so there is no kink reinforcing my bladder sphincter. I do not have stress incontinence while I am mindful of body/space relationships. eg, I can jump down a two foot drop and not wet myself.

I could feel my bladder in my vulva half an hour ago when I was under the shower with one foot up on a ledge, bent over, scrubbing my feet, but now I can only just feel my bladder at the back of my vulva, there is no sign of my rectocele and no sign of my cervix. It changes all the time, depending on what I have been doing.

Success for me now is being able to get back to benchmark in ten minutes. I don't record it anywhere. It is about lack of troubling sensations, and lack of fear of worsening, and trusting my body to be able to continue to do this.

So yes, the reversal is physical, because it is about exerting control over the way the organs are arranged, but I believe that if I went to a doctor for grading I would not get meaningful measurements because I can change the the 'worseness' of my POPs simply by doing things with my body. I don't know how a doctor would grade my POPs now, and I believe the grading system is only useful to a surgeon or patient who is trying to measure whether it is getting worse or not. We gave that up a long time ago, because it is not getting worse.

The Valsalva Manoeuvre (bearing down) on your back will measure it, but one of the things even a doctor will tell you is bad for POP is bearing down, so why do it, and risk worsening your POP? It is like a mechanic telling you to change the oil in your car by starting it, then undoing the plug and forcing the old oil out, which would potentially damage the motor.

My pelvic organs will always have the potential to prolapse because I have endopelvic fascia that was changed after episiotomy with my first birth. All my endopelvic fascia is stretched from three pregnancies.

But my POPs rarely stop me from doing anything, so that's fine by me.

Does that clarify at all?

Louise

Hi Lifeblessings

There's no such thing as a question that is too personal here.

How do you know if you're making improvement? Well, it's a long term, incremental thing.

First of all, I was never 'graded'. I live in the UK with the National Health Service, and if you are not drug abusing, beating your children or morbidly obese they're not very interested in investigating or 'grading' at my local GP's surgery. (Odd that they're still keen on cutting us up, but maybe they'll stop pushing it with all our cuts in health funding - that would be one positive to come from the recession!) My GP said my urethocele was 'pretty minor' - but because of where it is it peeks out sometimes ( generally in the first half of my cycle) and is as big as a small grape, (except in the first half of my cycle, when it's as big as a big grape . I'm guessing all this by touch - I'm not taking photos or doing measurements believe me.

Improvement isn't steady or constant as every woman's pop varies depending on hormones or recent activity. I realised I was improving when I started keeping a diary and noting when my symproms were better. Then after say six months I realised that for a few months they had rarely troubled me in the second half of my cycle. That's what I mean by measuring - it's keeping track and looking at a pattern over months or years. You can do this, but no doctor can, which is why their 'grading' system is pretty meaningless.

Now you're young - your bulges might reduce quite a bit, permanently, or you might get so good at managing them that they have no impact on your life at all. My bulge might get smaller - it used to be a big grape all the time and I'd love it to be a flattened raisin, but as a woman in her prime ( forties) I'm philosophical if it doesn't cooperate.

Hope this is some help. Keeping a diary is useful, I don't think asking the doctor to measure your lady parts is.

Hugs

Doubtul

Hey, I would skip the raisin analogies for now. Just you wait. There is plenty of time for raisin analogies when your skin gets wrinkly (and other bits too)! ;-)

My fave. raisins are muscatels, the sun-dried ones that come with stems and seeds, munched with raw almonds. Yum.

Louise