I was settling down to one of those airport tables with high stools and power sockets at the gate of my plane, waiting for the agent to announce boarding, when I felt a storm gathering on the top of my buttocks. This was my last flight after my book trip away from home in May. I’ve barely left my chair for the last two weeks due to posting, podcasting, writing, and the tense, anxious scrolling that comes with a book release. But I moved from the plane to the hotel and the bookstore without any problems. I even decided to walk to the bookstores from the hotels and back to indulge in some Walt Whitman-style fantasy.
But now, at the last moment, alarm bells rang out. I felt pain as if I had been hit tough in the tailbone, like I had experienced after jumping in an inner tube and landing on my butt on packed snow. However, there was no event to which this pain could be attributed. He came uninvited. And now, not only did it hurt to sit down when I had two hours of forced sitting ahead of me, but the pain was increasing with every minute.
I spent the flight leaning forward in my seat, my weight completely on one leg, rocking back and forth as much as I could without looking like I was experiencing religious hallucinations. When I had to get up, it was all I could do to keep from crying – despite the pain I felt while sitting, standing up sent a radical guitar solo through my tailbone.
At the time, I was about four months postpartum after giving birth to my first child and, all things considered, I had a blissful recovery. Thanks to over a decade of lifting ponderous weights, I had pelvic muscles made of steel. I continued this practice until two weeks before giving birth. I’d only been back to lifting weights for a few months – deadlifts, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, a row or pull-up here and there – but everything was going well.
At first I thought that maybe the pain would disappear as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. I knew that just as the body goes through a process of relaxing and expanding to prepare for birth, it slowly condenses again in the months after the baby is born. I thought maybe my sudden sedentary lifestyle had healed my body too much, as in Debut of the Year. I started doing some stretching exercises I found online to stretch my bones again – I crossed my ankle over my knee and pulled my knee towards my chest; sit straight with your legs spread on the floor at right angles; knees crossed like an overzealous lotus position. Again, it seemed to lend a hand a little, but the pain persisted and got so bad that I screamed every time I tried to sit for more than 10 minutes. This was a problem because, in a sense, sitting was my livelihood – as a writer, I couldn’t write down words or read if I couldn’t stay still. Finally, after weeks of staying at home, I made an appointment with a physiotherapist who, after hearing about my problems, referred me to a pelvic floor specialist.
The pelvic floors are is not a body part I grew up hearing about. And not long before my pelvic floor episode, I learned that we all have it – ancient people, children, women, men. Most people are only familiar with pelvic floor activity in relation to the “Kegel,” the semi-mystical grasping movement that women are encouraged to do in order to have good sex and, worse yet, to get their baby out of the birth canal. But Kegels only capture one miniature aspect of the pelvic floor’s capabilities.