An Intro to Grief and Pelvic Pain
You would think that they would not be synonymous with each other, but in my experience and in what I have witnessed when working with patients, they often go hand in hand. I think of it as akin to when someone loses their long term spouse and the other ends up dying of a heart condition or in some ways a broken heart, grief can be a pretty powerful indicator of what is occurring in the body.
I feel like this could be a series and I will probably write it up as one, but I wanted to start off with just identifying how grief and pelvic pain can be linked. I will begin with my story and my experience first and will then also share how what I have encountered as a pelvic PT has also informed what I have seen and noticed about grief and how it likes to inhabit the body.
I had already been enduring extreme loss after losing my son at 20 weeks. I lost him in January 2012 and I rushed straight into my next big thing, beginning my journey towards graduate school to become a physical therapist. I remember several months into doing school and living life again and trying not to be re-triggered by my grief that I was starting to have some strange pain, literally in my butt. It was not something I had experienced before and I didn’t know how it came about. It would feel like a mix between intense cramping like I had to go poop and lightening shooting through my rectum at the same time. Sometimes it would be relieved with me having a bowel movement and other times just breathing and settling into my body helped and other times, it was just time that helped it, but it never went away and I didn’t know how it snuck up on me. I remember one episode of this when I was walking back to my car from the grocery store and I literally stopped in my tracks and had to walk super slowly so I would not fall over from the pain and tried to put on an air of someone not in pain as I walked.
This went on for a few months and the most intense feeling of this pain occurred during the summer of 2012. I was attending a drum and dance camp that my husband was hosting and I was the cook for the weekend event. Again, I don’t know what triggered it, but I literally could not function and do what I needed to do. I was laying in my bed doubled over in pain. My husband had his friend who was a bodyworker come by and do some work with me. She laid her hands on my pelvis, over my womb and I really can’t remember if I cried or not, but over that period of time, my pain decreased. The pain never went away and continued to creep and invade its way into my life, but I had just the very few inklings of understanding how this rectal pain that I was experiencing, that literally came out of nowhere, was contributing a lot to my pelvic pain. I literally was not allowing my body to sit with the grief, to sit with the heavy pain of my loss. So my body gave me lots of messages, pain as being one of them, that I needed to sit with it. But I wasn’t ready to.