Pelvic Floor Therapy

Today was my first session at the pelvic floor therapy. It went really well. I feel like I have my hope back.

The nice lady (her name was Katie) asked me about all my symptoms and then explained a bit about the pelvis and how pelvic floor therapy works. Basically the pelvis has a LOT of muscles and they are made out of skeletal tissue, which means that just as you get kinks and knots in your shoulders, you can get kinks and knots in the muscles by the pelvis. But there's more to it in that. If anything is out of alignment, it can push something else out of alignment and cause dysfunction or pain. Basically all the organs in the pelvic region are meant to slide past each other as you move or breathe and if they don't, there can be pain.

She did an external exam and then an internal exam of me. For the external exam, she had me stand, sit and lie down on the bed. She examined my thigh muscles, pressing carefully along my legs. It was fascinating because she found these trigger points of pain in my thighs that made me cry out. She explained that this comes about in most women who have sexual pain, because part of what happens when we tighten is we clamp the thigh muscles together. Anyway, she worked on smoothing, massaging and unknotting those trigger points of pain in the thighs.

Once she had finished with that, she got to my internal exam. She explained that there are three layers of muscle in the vagina. We found that my pain was largely concentrated in the muscles in the middle of the figure 8. The figure 8 is made by imagining it twining around the urethra/vagina as one opening and your anus as the other. You can trace a figure 8 around these. The muscles in the middle of the figure 8 (I think the perineal ones? by the perineum?) are the culprit in my case. They are what are causing me so much pain.

The amazingly cool part was that just by moving my muscles with her hand (manually manipulating them) she was able to make that pain much much less so that I almost couldn't feel it. Basically she was contorting the pelvic muscles manually to slacken them and once they were slackened the muscles were no longer screaming pain pain pain in my brain but were tricked into feeling fine. Taking deep breaths and letting out my tension also relaxed me further.

She gave me some stuff to work on (to help relax me and also to work on the thigh muscles that were so tight). I'm supposed to practice diaphragmatic breathing, the butterfly position (knees bent and feet together, like in gym class in school) and also leaning on one leg while having the other one bent and then vice versa.