I know I left you all on a little cliffhanger in the last post but I really felt like talking about my postpartum injury required a post of its own. Here we go!

So, like I mentioned it was pretty clear to me from right after delivery that something wasn’t quite right with my body. This being my third baby, I knew what normal postpartum soreness/pain should feel like and what I was experiencing was definitely not that. Not only could I not walk without excruciating pain, I also couldn’t lift my foot to put on my underwear/pants, step up to get into the car, go up or up down stairs, shift my weight around in bed, or lie on my side AT ALL.

My midwife, when she came for my postpartum checkup the day after A’s birthday, was the first to point out that it seemed like pelvic instability was the cause of a lot of the issues in my movement. As in, anything that required my pelvic bone to be uneven or tilted was unbearable; she recommended a binder for my hips and helped fashion a ghetto one out of a postpartum wrap for me. It helped but not very much as I was still in very much pain. In comparison to the pain I was feeling in my hips & pelvic bone, my actual nether regions (which were what should have been hurting since I’d just delivered a 10 lb baby) didn’t bother me at all. It was an odd sensation to be postpartum and dealing with all the normal postpartum bleeding, breastfeeding, exhaustion, etc stuff but to not actually have too much pain related to my hoo-haw.

On Day 3 of being postpartum, I called my chiropractor who I had been seeing regularly throughout my pregnancy with A (and before I was pregnant, too) and squeezed in an appointment with him. I didn’t know how to fix myself or help alleviate the pain but I figured if it was a bone/hip thing, my chiropractor might be of some help. J had to drive me because I literally could not extend my foot to drive without pain in my pelvic bone and I hobbled into his office. It was there that I got an x-ray done and my chiropractor broke some very overwhelming news for me – pubic symphysis diastasis.

What?

If you’ve ever had a baby, you might recognize the diastasis part of the diagnosis. It means a split or separation and it’s commonly seen in the term “diastasis recti” – that abdominal split that is very common among pregnant women. The pubic symphysis, according to Wikipedia is the joint that sits between and joins the left and right side of your pubic bones together. It’s at the very center of your pelvic bone, right underneath your bladder (which would explain why I was screaming that it felt like my pee hole was ripping apart when I was delivering A). He said the x-ray showed that there was a complete split, like a visible GAP, in between the two sides of my pubic bones and there really was no remedy except to rest and wait for the ligament to grow back in.

…. Did you just tell me to rest? I have 3 kids to take care of, it’s the middle of the school year, my husband just started a new job and only got ONE week off for paternity leave, and now I’m required to be on bedrest because my body is literally broken in half from delivering my baby? I felt so defeated and overwhelmed, I didn’t know how I was going to come back from this injury. In a moment of stupidity and desperation, I googled pubic symphysis diastasis to see if there were any first-hand accounts of women who had gone through it and how long it took before they were recovered. Instead, I ended up stumbling across an old news article about a woman who had the injury and never recovered and was forced to quit her job and just live with her handicap forever. (This is why they say you should never google medical stuff, by the way – LOL.)

I called my mom, sobbing on the phone about how I needed her to come and help. She has always come and helped me with my kids when they were newborns but for this baby, I’d stupidly told her that I’d be fine and wouldn’t need her help. It was my third go around, I wasn’t recovering from surgery, baby A was such a good eater and sleeper, I hadn’t thought I’d need any additional help from her. Now it looked like I’d need her help indefinitely (which was also a hard pill for me to swallow because I am very much a Type A person and like to do things my way/myself). Of course, being the best Nana ever, she was more than willing to come back to my house for “as long as I needed”.

I stayed on bedrest for almost a full month. It sounds luxurious but it really wasn’t. It wasn’t fun to not be able to get up and hold my newborn or rock her when she was fussy. It wasn’t fun to not get to pack my kids lunches for school or pick them up at the end of the day.

I started seeing a postpartum physical therapist in hopes of speeding up my recovery but while she came highly recommended by my midwife, she actually didn’t have any firsthand experience with treating a pubic symphysis diastasis injury. I stopped seeing her after a few weeks because it seemed like a waste of time.

Around the 1-month postpartum mark, the most movement I could do was still just a small-shuffle style walk. Even though my parents were still around and such big helps, both J & I were starting to feel desperate for some real solutions to help aid my recovery. I don’t know what inspired him to do this, but J called around to some acupuncturists and found a highly recommended one that wasn’t too far from us. His logic was that if Western medicine’s approach was just to “wait and see” and that wasn’t getting us anywhere, there wouldn’t be any harm in trying an Eastern medicine approach. I didn’t think acupuncture would help me at all but I also couldn’t find a point to disagree with him on so I went to the appointment he set up.

**I also just want to add a mini-rant here about how UNHELPFUL my Kaiser doctors were in all this. I emailed both my GP and OBGYN, explaining my pain, explaining that I’d had an x-ray done privately, and asking please – what can I do? Both doctors not only didn’t have any recommendations or advice for me, they basically brushed off my complaint as if I didn’t have a legitimate injury. Both of them, their responses were that this was “common” (it’s not), lots of women have pubic symphysis discomfort after delivery (really? REALLY?) and I should just wait 3-6 months to let my body heal. WTH KAISER, you want me to just wait for 6 months to see if my body will fix itself? What am I supposed to do in the meantime, just be a complete invalid and let my three kids fend for themselves? UGH!

Anyway, back to the acupuncturist. I was so skeptical. J took a “work from home” day so he could drive me to the appointment and I felt so bad that he was basically playing hooky from a new job that he had worked hard to land. I had to walk up a flight of stairs to reach the front door of the office and was forced to walk up it sideways because the pain was so intense if I tried to walk straight forward.

Two hours later and I was traipsing down the same flight of stars like it was no. big. deal. I don’t know what this miracle magic worker acupuncturist did, but he basically would push a point on my pelvic bone and ask if it hurt and if I said yes, he’d stick a needle somewhere else on my body (like my leg or my hip). Repeat for two hours and when it was all said and done, I literally felt like a new woman.

It was SUCH a relief to be able to walk (WALK! SO BASIC!) without any pain. I went back to see him a few more times but eventually had to stop because it was hard to get my schedule to match up with his. I also figured that maybe with this little extra boost in my recovery, my body would take up the rest and strengthen/heal on its own.

Fast forward a few months and I was functioning but not like a normal person. It was September now, baby A was 5 months old, a new school year had started for the two big kids, and other than walking pain-free, I still couldn’t do most of my old activities. Stairs, hills, lifting a leg up to shave … all pretty impossible. It seemed like it was time to take recovery back into my own hands again because clearly my body wasn’t going to be able to do it on its own (again, thanks for nothing Kaiser doctors. THANKS FOR NOTHING.)

I decided I should probably see a physical therapist but this time I did some internet digging (ie, Yelp) to find one who maybe had experience in my specific injury. I found a lady about 30 minutes away and she and I clicked on the phone instantly. Compared to the first PT that I’d initially seen right after A was born, this one not only seemed to really understand my body/injury, but she was able to educate me along the way as to why certain pains are felt with specific injuries. She got me started with some basic rolling and strengthening techniques and also did some manual therapy (think: really painful massage) on some of my trigger points. It was a slower recovery turnaround than the acupuncturist I’d seen before but slowly yet surely, I started to see my body return to its normal functions.

First, I was able to do hills/slight inclines without pain. The driveway up to our house is actually a pretty steep incline and I could now walk to the mailbox to check our mail and back without feeling anything. Next, I found myself successfully navigating stairs completely pain-free (the acupuncturist had healed me to a point where I could do stairs but I still felt a little twinge of pain whenever doing them). Soon, I would only feel the pain if I did something to exacerbate my body (like, we took our kids to Disneyland over the holidays and the next day, my groin was making me pay for it).

By spring of this year, so after roughly 6 months of weekly physical therapy (sometimes for 2x a week, especially in the beginning) she & I both agreed that I had pretty much recovered fully. I didn’t really feel anything at all unless I went for a long walk, and even if I did feel something, it registered at around a 1 on a scale of 1-10. She told me that I might always feel that slight “something” since it was a pretty traumatic injury that I’d sustained, but I was okay with that since by this point, it just felt more like a “reminder sensation” that I’d once broken that ligament versus an actual pain in that area.

Now we’re at the end of May and I’m still seeing her, although we’ve tapered down to an every other week frequency. I actually hardly ever feel anything at all now (not even the “reminder sensations”), even if I exercise or physically strain myself. Now that I’m healed, our goal is to strengthen my muscles. I was an active person and exercised regularly before getting pregnant with A and my body lost all that muscle & strength in the 2 years I took off in baking my baby, delivering her, then recovering from my injury. We’re working on getting to a point where I’m strong enough to run and then I think we’ll probably say our goodbyes. It might be a little emotional for me since I basically owe my entire physical well-being to this lady; I don’t know where I’d be in my recovery if it weren’t for her.

So there you have it! A just turned 1 a few weeks ago and I am only just now at a point where I feel like the injury is (hopefully) behind me. I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve heard that if your pubic symphysis has been compromised in one pregnancy, it’s more likely to be compromised in future ones so that pretty much sealed the deal for us that baby A would be our last. Not that we were planning to have any more regardless – we’re very much content with what the Lord has given us already and are SUPER excited to move on to the next season of parenthood with our three kiddos. J & I already talk about all the fun vacations we’ll get to take once A reaches an age when taking her on a long flight doesn’t make us want to pee our pants (we’re thinking when she turns 3 or 4 will be good for us).

I don’t take for granted any of the physical capabilities that my body has now because I very much know what it’s like to not be able to do anything at all. EVEN the battle to get off the last bit of baby weight, though the struggle is REAL, has been fun for me because there was such a long period of time when I couldn’t exercise at all. (Y’all, please don’t forget that I gained 80 lbs this time around, and while I’m still not back in my pre-pregnancy jeans quite yet, I AM SO CLOSE I CAN JUST TASTE IT. Summer 2018, watch out for me!)