And stretch....
We started our ante natal classes a couple of weeks ago and so are learning all that is necessary to get through birth and the first few weeks with a new baby. Yeah right! Actually they have been really helpful and enjoyable, mostly for the companionship and the socialising afterwards (I pity the people next to us in the cafe - a table of 8 pregnant women who have just spent two hours learning about labour and birth - you can imagine the conversations we have!) but I have learnt a few especially helpful things, the most important are related to the stretching and strengthening of various intimate parts of the female body...
Pelvic floor exercises...in case you don't know these are when you squeeze down below like you're trying to stop the flow of urine, and are nothing to do with your pelvis or lying on a floor or anything nice like that, anyway... these exercises are crucial it seems unless I want to spend months after the birth wetting myself every time laugh or sneeze or run to catch a bus. Or in really bad cases just for no reason at all. The cure for post birth stress incontinence (as it's known), as well as more pelvic floor exercises of course, is a course of torture with a physiotherapist. The torture is mainly of the psychological kind involving excruciating embarassment and goes something like this: the physiotherapist gives you a large rubber tampon like thing(hygienically sterilised of course) and instructs you to go into the loo and insert it into your vagina and hold it there. It will fall out. You go back and are then given a bigger one - repeating this process until you get one that you can keep in! Then you have to keep this one in and do exercises. Over the course of a few weeks you downsize until you can hold in the normal tampon sized one and by then in theory you can manage not to pee when you sneeze. This really should be enough to make ANYONE do the 50 pelvic floor exercises per day that are suggested! Although oddly enough it is actually quite hard even knowing the above. You have to do them in sets of 5, that means remembering, and having a suitable moment to do them, 10 times a day! Quite a lot for a pregnant brain to manage.
Having spent all this time strengthening the pelvic floor muscles, we must next prepare to stretch the skin covering these muscles in order to help prevent vaginal/perineal tears during delivery, which obviously would be very painful, and can also lead to even worse incontinence issues. To do this we use Perineal Massage, which should more accurately be called Stretching the Hell out of your entire perineal area. There is massage oil involved but apart from that it doesn't sound pleasant! You probably don't really want to know what it involves, but to get an idea you could try putting a finger in each side of your mouth and pulling outwards in opposite directions - that is the kind of stretch we're talking about. Five minutes every day for the last month of pregnancy. Hmmm, looking forward to that.
Pelvic floor exercises...in case you don't know these are when you squeeze down below like you're trying to stop the flow of urine, and are nothing to do with your pelvis or lying on a floor or anything nice like that, anyway... these exercises are crucial it seems unless I want to spend months after the birth wetting myself every time laugh or sneeze or run to catch a bus. Or in really bad cases just for no reason at all. The cure for post birth stress incontinence (as it's known), as well as more pelvic floor exercises of course, is a course of torture with a physiotherapist. The torture is mainly of the psychological kind involving excruciating embarassment and goes something like this: the physiotherapist gives you a large rubber tampon like thing(hygienically sterilised of course) and instructs you to go into the loo and insert it into your vagina and hold it there. It will fall out. You go back and are then given a bigger one - repeating this process until you get one that you can keep in! Then you have to keep this one in and do exercises. Over the course of a few weeks you downsize until you can hold in the normal tampon sized one and by then in theory you can manage not to pee when you sneeze. This really should be enough to make ANYONE do the 50 pelvic floor exercises per day that are suggested! Although oddly enough it is actually quite hard even knowing the above. You have to do them in sets of 5, that means remembering, and having a suitable moment to do them, 10 times a day! Quite a lot for a pregnant brain to manage.
Having spent all this time strengthening the pelvic floor muscles, we must next prepare to stretch the skin covering these muscles in order to help prevent vaginal/perineal tears during delivery, which obviously would be very painful, and can also lead to even worse incontinence issues. To do this we use Perineal Massage, which should more accurately be called Stretching the Hell out of your entire perineal area. There is massage oil involved but apart from that it doesn't sound pleasant! You probably don't really want to know what it involves, but to get an idea you could try putting a finger in each side of your mouth and pulling outwards in opposite directions - that is the kind of stretch we're talking about. Five minutes every day for the last month of pregnancy. Hmmm, looking forward to that.
posted by Kiran McKinnon at 10:21 am
1 Comments:
holy shit. the things they don't tell you in sex ed...
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