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.

Wifely

I've been having a lot of trouble of late with 'shoulds' and 'musts.' My brain is all about 'you should be having sex with your husband a lot more often than you are choosing to have sex. You are not a good wife if you do not do this.' The other part of me is feeling exhausted, unhappy and frustrated and is sitting there saying: This hurts. It does not make sense to do something that hurts you. Plus, I feel like by now I hate sex- I hate everything about it- the fact that it's like a chore I'm supposed to do and I hate the stickiness and I just hate everything.

I've also been trying to figure out what exactly the pain is about. What I've discovered is the pain specifically happens upon initial insertion/ penetration and sometimes also when my husband withdraws (especially if he's still hard when doing so). It's almost like there's a ring of something there that really hurts. We've also discovered that different lubricants make a difference. KY Jelly and plain olive oil really work well for us; Astroglide is awful.

Anyway, I made an appointment with the pelvic floor therapist but now I am frustrated because they have this rule that I need to be referred by an MD. So that's annoying because this is a private situation that I am dealing with and it's very upsetting to me that I potentially have to reveal what's going on to yet another person just so that they can write me a stupid referral. I think that is unfair. Hopefully I can just get in touch with my gyencologist and have her refer me, but it's still very annoying.

But then comes the good times, after all this complaining...the times when I'm not exhausted and feeling like this is a chore I'm supposed to do in good wifely fashion, the times when I'm actually excited and aroused by my husband, the times when we're both in tune and those times go well...except for the initial penetration part of the scenario.

I think a major issue for people in my situation is that we have no idea what it is to look forward to. I'm expending all this effort and energy just to try to get sex to not hurt. I have no idea what it's like when it's actually enjoyable. And it's hard to keep working on this when you have no idea what you are working TOWARD. What am I trying to get to? What is an enjoyable sex life like? I have no idea.

But at least I do know what shared intimacy and love is like, and hopefully that's enuogh to buoy me up in the meantime.

Ouch

So while the consummation of our marriage was a great first step, I'm getting tired of sex always meaning pain. Either it means pain that comes from inserting the dilators before we have sex, or it means the pain of my husband inserting his penis and moving it around when we ARE having sex. (Oh, by the way, that was a big step- we graduated to being able to have sex without prepping with dilators first. My reasoning was, if it's going to hurt either way, I'd rather we had the spontaneity part still and you can penetrate me rather than a piece of plastic).

I'm looking into pelvic floor therapy. Maybe they will be able to help me to relax my muscles so that penetration does not equate with pain.

My poor husband feels horrible because he wants to be intimate with me but he knows that that means pain for me. He feels selfish. (I tell him he isn't and it's totally natural for a husband to want to sleep with his wife.) I feel like a horrible wife because I turn him away and we only get two weeks a month anyway to be intimate because of the whole Niddah thing.

This Rosh Hashana I prayed that we be able to fix this so that sex was not something I dreaded but rather a good and happy thing like it is in other people's marriages. I feel really down about this. Before I got married I was such a sexual creature. I loved petting and necking and kissing and all that stuff and was excited about going further. Who knew it would turn into a nightmare?

I just wish I could be a better wife to my husband.