Epiphany!

Daphne 11 that certainly is something we will all enjoy hearing. I know that joy you are talking about. Nothing like it!

I'm happy for you too...once you "know it", you'll never forget.

As we get older and the vagina gets drier (or during the first few months postpartum) or even in the second half of the menstrual cycle, l am sure that the walls of my vagina get stuck together. It is as if the rugae on posterior and anterior walls 'lock together'. This 'fixes' the angle of the vagina, so it is more difficult to move my bladder up and in. Plenty of lube when I am feeling that my bladder is low allows my vaginal walls to shift over each other, so my vagina can move from an L shape, with the bladder lying on the horizontal short arm of the L, with the top half more vertical , towards a gentle curve without a pronounced angle, and the bladder further forward.

I was doing some butt tucking yesterday, lifting a heavy post driver over a steel star picket at about head height. My cystocele didn't like it. Afterwards, I tried firebreathing and jiggling, to no avail, but I inserted some lube and cannot remember feeling my cystocele again for the rest of the evening. It is fine today.

I am a postmenopausal 64 yra. old with the prolapse problems for many years. Never had surgery, no other "devices", born with tipped uterus. My problem is pressure on the bladder where you feel like you have a UTI but don't - comes and goes. Difficult/impossible to completely empty bladder/frequent urination. Good news is it's been mostly under control all these years and only started bothering me a lot a couple of years ago. Came across your site and tried the fire breathing, etc. and seemed to get better. Sometimes I go for very long periods with no problem. But the problem is I also have degenerative disc disease that causes my hips to chronicly "go out" - the right one goes up, the left rotates inward or "backward". I get regular chiropractic adjustments for these. But they never stay. Again, it feels like a UTI (without the burning when urinating) but it's not. Wondering if these "adjustments" can somehow sprain, weaken those pelvic muscles, causing the prolapse to worsen? I know I get sprained "EXTRA EASY" & does that in the other areas like my neck.
And if so, what are the recommendations to help that?

Hi Momprayn – Can you stand and move in actual Whole Woman posture? Belly relaxed, chest pulled up, shoulders down? This might be a completely different thing for your hips and spine from what they are used to. Most of us here are not remotely equipped to give you advice on this. A consult with Christine herself (Guru of all things related to hips) or another practitioner might be in order. Check the WW store and/or Practitioners tab up above. I’m not saying you won’t get other suggestions……but we want you to be safe in whatever you do. For difficult urination, getting down on hands and knees in the shower might be the best way. - Surviving

Hi Momprayn

You do have a very good grasp of what is happening in your body. Now to work out what to do about it. I have had over the years various chiropractors who have treated similar subluxations. I have also had bulging lumbar discs. The subluxations lead to uneven positions for the two halves of my pelvis.

You say you have had a tipped uterus from birth. I am not convinced that this is possible because the newborn girl's uterus, bladder and rectum, along with the spine are straight up and down in the body. There is no lumbar curve. They are all parallel. Tipped means tipped back, as opposed to tipped forward. It is more likely that your uterus has tipped somewhere between birth and when the doctor first diagnosed it; maybe when the little girl became a woman and decided that she wanted a flat tummy, and she was very self-conscious about her new 'woman' state, and tucked her butt under to try and hide her new 'womanly' hips, thighs and breasts?????

Often doctors describe unexplained things in the body as having been there from birth because they know no other reason for it. If they think they know all there is to know, then this is a fair assumption, but ... ;-)

I am not dissing your doctor by saying this. They are only human, and just like us, don't know everything, but want to appear competent and knowledgable. What medical student is going to question a senior doctor who tells them that a uterus can be retroverted at birth??. A lot of these things are passed on from generation to generation of doctors in medical school, but nobody ever questions the validity of these statements when made by the man who marks their exam papers. Every now and then one of these doctors' wives tales, as I call them, is debunked, as having no basis in fact. Modern imaging is likely to debunk this one too, eventually. In all my (informal) research, and what I have learned from Christine about human development, I have never seen an illustration or image of a retroverted uterus in a newborn. I have only ever heard women say, "My doctor told me it was retroverted at birth".

I have been using WW posture for nine years now. My bulging discs are no more, nor do I get one sided pain in my pelvis, or pain along the top rim of my ilia (hip bones) and my ischia (the sit bones). My shoulders are no longer uneven in height. I know this because I have recently been dressmaking, making clothes for myself on a body clone that I made out of duct tape over five years ago. Now, if I make a top to fit the clone it sits unevenly on my shoulders. It is simple. WW posture has straightened my body, removing the twisting that caused the scoliosis and uneven hips, and put undue pressure on my lumbar discs. My severely retroverted uterus, which was observed as retroverted the first time I had a PAP smear, aged about 19, suddenly flipped back to anteverted about six years ago, a couple of years before menopause.

What depresses me is the prospect of having to make a new body clone for the new me! ;-(

WW posture can help you to get your hips into alignment again, so that you may no longer need chiropractic treatment. It is likely to take a little time, but you will start to see changes as you described, quite quickly. There are no guarantees of course, but what do you have to lose? What do you have to potentially gain?

Louise

When we look at our bodies everything is connected with connective tissue like the old song about bones. So problems in one part can lead to difficulties in another. The problem with pelvic organ prolapses is that they are in the centre of things and as a result so many other muscles, bones, and organs can impact upon them.

This feeling of having a UTI without the bacteria infection once you have a prolapse can result from any number of things. In my case, I have uterine prolapse and if I am not careful with my diet, or do not have ready access to toilet facilities, catch a cold, or eat the wrong food, or drink too much liquid, take particular drugs then I am likely to have frequent and incomplete urination.

The trick as told by Christine in her book “Saving the Wholewoman” is to half squat when you void; your weight on your feet rather than the toilet bowl. If you are anything like me you will find that when you sit on the toilet seat your muscles relax too much and the prolapse pushes out further and this is something very important to avoid. For this means that those old pelvic organs are pressing upon each other and they should not, if your urination is to be problem free. Or, as Surviving mentioned, if you have incomplete urination you need to ensure complete emptying of the bladder at least once a day and this is easiest achieved perhaps by getting down on all fours in the shower or over a basin. I find that if I return to the toilet after a little walk around after initial urination then if there is some left to come, it will more comfortably complete at a second try. No forcing mind. In this way, I do not need the all fours stance.

Another good thing to do is to diaphragm breathe deeply, lower tummy out on the inhale and lower tummy in on the exhale. Do this deeply and slowly. It relaxes things and that’s what you need. If nothing happens give it away, but make sure there is a toilet still within reach. Psychological reassurance at these times makes it more of a breeze.

As to the ‘spraining easy’ problem. As a child I had ‘sprain easy’ ankles, the solution to which was to build up the heel of my left shoe fractionally. I took it from that there was a minuscule difference in leg length which was at the heart of the problem. More recently when I broke my right hip, gentle exercise and resting up was the way to go. Walking around is the best exercise, more than that and you can become like the keen young goer who wants to go out there and run. Six weeks and they very often earn themselves a strain. I know chiropractors are the last resort when we are in pain, but I think I would be preferring some reputable acupuncture treatment, preferably by someone trained in China.

Having said that, WWposture does appear to help hips, as I have been doing it for near on 3 years now and my hip after initially mending became bad again after walking over sand of all things and since then I started WWposture and it has improved since posture.

I take it your doctor was talking of a tipped uterus possibly being a genetic inheritance. I have often wondered about that. My mother and my maternal grandmother both had uterine prolapse. I strongly suspect my maternal great grandmother, did as well, so a genetic tendency possibly to uterine prolapse manifesting early, possibly at birth, in a tipped uterus makes a lot of sense to me as perhaps it did your doctor.
est wishes, Fab

This is very interesting - do you mean that you press on the bladder from inside the vagina? Is that why you need cream? Sorry to be dim.