Newbie saying hello

Sweet Rose Marie, I am also new and have no advice to offer you, but just to say that it sounds like you are dealing with so very, very much, and I just want to send you a
!!GREAT

!!!!!!!!BIG

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!HUG

Hello Sweet Rose Marie,

I too wanted to send you hugs although I too have no wisdom to offer other than to read these forums - they will make you feel stronger and braver and believe you can and will survive this. Like you I feel such terror and have been unable to stop crying - but I have learned that to heal and get well I need to be calm and stop all the negative reactions. I will pray you can do this too.

Love to you
x

Hi SweetRoseMarie

Welcome to Wholewoman. It looks like you have received lots of lovely hugs already. It is lovely to see that our other Newbies, Octaviel and Squeak are feeling OK enough and encouraged enough after a short time to extend a hand to another scared lady.

It sounds like the health issues are stacking up against you, and I am not surprised that you feel like you are falling apart on top of everything else. Hopefully we will be able, with the help of the book and DVD, to get you on a path to recovery in many ways.

As any surgery would be risky for you, you have good reason to invest plenty of time and energy seeing what you can get out of Wholewoman techniques. Buying the book will give you all the theory you will need to understand what has happened to your body POP-wise, and give you a good theoretical grounding for you to be able to tailor it to your own body.

We are all scared to some degree or other when POP appears, especially if it creeps up behind you and goes, "Boo!" in a big way, just when you were not expecting it. I know it is a bit theoretical at the moment to say it, but your fear will dissipate somewhat once you begin to understand your body better and realise that there are many things that you can do to get your body to behave better. We would all like to have a low maintenance body, but only a woman over a certain age really understands that its integrity is not guaranteed in her older years, so we just have to make the most of our hand and do with it what we can. Sometimes we get a pleasant surprise.

Being scared is one thing, but being scared also affects our bodies, partly I think because of the adrenalin that courses through our body when we are stressed. There are other biochemical things that happen too. So dissipating the fear has to be a priority, so it doesn't exacerbate your other health problems.

I know that inflammation is the current buzzword, but from your description of your medical conditions it would seem that you have more than your fair share of inflammatory diseases.We have discussed anti-inflammatory diet extensively on these Forums. I suggest that you put these and similar terms into the Search box and have a look at what has been written in terms of increasing the amount of omega 3 oils in your diet and cutting out the higher omegas. Some say that we are not meant to eat meat, but it is not as simple as that. Free range meat from animals and birds that browse and graze their own chosen diet have a low omega 3 : omega 6 (and omega 9?) ratio, whereas for animals that are grainfed on feedlots for several months the ratio can shoot up to 1:20, probably because they are fed a lot of material that less desirable fats, ie cottonseed meal, canola meal, and grains. Dieticians recommend keeping the ratio under 1:4. Much supermarket meat, especially in the USA, is grain fed, and the longer an animal is grainfed the worse the ratio becomes. If it is only finished on a feedlot for a couple of weeks the ratio only goes up to about 8:1. Grassfed beef has about the same ratio as oily fish. This is all in a paper called "The effect of feeding systems on omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and trans fatty acids in Australian beef cuts: potential impact on human health", by Ponnampalam, Mann and Sinclair, published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2006, ; 15 (1): 21-29.

So it is not good enough to cut out the omega 6 and 9 and trans fats from our own diet. This high ratio finds its way into dairy foods, eggs, meats and especially processed foods.

There are also some beneficial super foods, for examplse chia, and some of the fruits (blueberries?). Pineapple, ginger, parsley and garlic, and almost anything green (particularly the crucifers, broccoli, cabbage etc). I have found that free range meats which are often organic as well, and game meats which are hunted in the wild, make an enormous improvement to my body pain levels.

I also now drink a lot of red clover tea, which many of us find helpful, others for lichen sclerosus, myself for hyperkeratitic dermatitis. It doesn't get rid of them completely, but helps enormously. Red clover should be mainly flowers and stems, because the flowers don't have as high an isoflavones content. Ironically, most of the red clover tea you can buy is mostly flowers, probably because it smells nice and is a nice association with the flowers, but get it as green as you can get it. I buy it online in 1kg packs, much more cheaply than at the healthfood store. It is usually sold as a cancer remedy, so they are often a bit cagey about showing it to customers, lest they be accused of quackery, but as a skin herb it is just wonderful, life-changing for me because I do so much with my hands. I can now do it pain free. Christine Kent's article on A Natural Remedy for Lichen Sclerosus is at the Library in the Village. That article explains why it works.

You will need to address all the factors you can with Wholewoman techniques. This means posture, diet, clothing, choice of exercise, working spaces and general environment, and the way you generally use your body. You will also need to think carefully about how much improvement is 'good enough'. I am 57, and at our age perfection is largely a thing of the past. There is a bit of head adjustment in being content once you reach a certain point.

It is all about being able to live your life, feeling that your POP's don't make much difference. Some women do really well with this approach, while others find that they are still dissatisfied after doing all they can. One thing is sure. If you have a body that hasn't been through pelvic repair surgery you have a better chance of making your prolapses trouble free with WW techniques. Another certainty is that if you look after your body better your health will improve in all aspects to some degree, so you really don't have anything to lose by giving this a crack for a year or so, and then reassess.

Keep calling back with questions, observations and progress reports. Happy searching and happy reading.

Louise
I

You can track member blogs by typing their username into the search box. Read about my many health issues. I am 56 years old and recently found relief from "unknown colon problems". I have always had seasonal allergies and sensitivity to dust and dogs. I took allergy shots for five years until they didn't work anymore. I sneezed all the time and had some wheezing. So I got retested. I had no idea I also had food sensitivities. The tests showed a sensitivity to dairy, eggs, yeast, pineapple, banana, and peppers of all kinds. About 30 minutes after eating anything containing these ingredients, I was in the bathroom eliminating. Just thought it was my diverticulosis acting up. Not so. My homeopathic MD became trained to use sublingually administered allergy drops. These drops are not available everywhere yet, I got lucky. Anyway, I avoided these foods while I was building up my dosage, 2 drops under the tongue, then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, then a new bottle beginning at 2 drops, 3,4,5 ect. After 7 bottles you begin a maintaining dosage of 4 drops daily. The entire process only takes 90 days. Then you can begin to re-introduce foods. I began this process in Feb. I can now cook with eggs and milk. I don't think the fruits and pepper were covered in the serum, so I continue to avoid them. The important thing is my colon problems were really food sensitivities. I feel great, now. You might want to try an elimination diet (google to find it) and see if you feel better. Then you and an allergist can decide what to do next. Hope this helps.
Melly

wanted to jump on the welcome wagon : )
don't have much to add though, except that it is highly unlikely (and practically impossible I think) that your bladder will drop out of your body completely. just isn't gonna happen.
and googler beware. lots of those prolapse photos were taken during surgery (or right before) and it is partially dissected or pulled out further for demonstration purposes. we don't have many 'real life' pics of prolapse, but mine surely looks nothing like those pics! not even in my worst days (was stage 3)
I hope your better days are just around the corner...

Hi Gmom

I will add that in the 6 or so years that I have been here we have asked a couple of times if there is any Member who has actually experienced their whole bladder or uterus coming out once they have reverted postpartum, or later in life.

It is normal for a postpartum woman to have much more movement in her organs but after a two year reversion is when we are interested in.

The silence was deafening. Not one Member responded, and we have had some pretty serious cases of POP in this community.

I will ask again.

Has any Member experienced their uterus or bladder coming out completely or anywhere near completely?

Yes Sweet, the pics are horrible, but did you see any of a woman standing? All the POP pictures I have seen on the net are of women lying with their legs apart, not standing up. Do you have a problem with your bladder sticking out when you are lying down? Why do they show pictures of women lying down? I think it is because that is the standard medical examining position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what your organs look like, or feel like, while standing up, which is when our symptoms are worst.

What sort of logic assesses a 'standing up' condition with the patient 'lying down'???

In countries like Nepal, where there is an epidemic of uterine prolapse, women return to hard physical labour straight after birth, and I am talking *hard* physical labour, before their uterus has even shrunk back to normal size, let alone all the slack connective tissue. Yes, I can see how their uterus would come out and stay out with the continued work, but I cannot see how it can happen in western society.

Be honest about what you see on the Net. Analyse it critically. And let me know if you do find stuff that shows that the organs do come out, because even though I think it is not possible except under the special circumstances that I described above, I would like to know.

Louise