"Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they are given wings."

-Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Bump in the road

The past couple of days haven't been too great. I guess it started Saturday when I noticed a little blood after I did my physical therapy exercises. It was nothing drastic, but the past few days I've also experienced heightened pain levels and can't put the dilators in. I went to physical therapy today and apparently there's many possible reason why I've backtracked.

The blood is one of two things- I either have a small tear or I inserted the dilator a little too far, which instigated that reaction. But, it's not a big deal and happens to a lot of women.

The elevated pain levels could be due to:
-stress (finals week)
-working out (have been going to the gym every day to get back in shape for tennis/climbing)
-Estrace (just started it 2 weeks ago)
-my time in the cycle (it's about halfway between my periods and this is the time my muscles could be very tight)

So no one knows which one of these or which combination is responsible for my problems. I also may have a yeast infection, but my therapist told me to just keep an eye on it now and wait to see if it gets worse. I've been taken off the dilators until finals are over, but I'm still on the Estrace.

It's frustrating to have made so much progress and almost feel like I'm back to step 1. And if this is due to high levels of stress and working out, then what am I supposed to do? Being active and stressed is just a part of my life, of most people's lives.

But I'm not getting upset yet, I think it's just a bump in the road, and hopefully a week from now, I'll be back on track.

5 comments:

Esther said...

Egad! Not knowing what's going on sucks. I hope everything resolves soon for you.

Molski said...

it will be alright champ.i would write something funny but i dont know how. so instead i will write this seemingly unrelated and useless message telling you it will be alright.
which is in fact, grandpa giglios life motto.

Anonymous said...

Grandpa gigglios is correct it will be alrite. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Just put your head down and work. It dd't get this way in a matter of weeks so it gonna take the same amount of time to heal. The bumps in the road are part of it unfortunatley. I am wishing you the speediest recovery.

alana

Anonymous said...

I was not able to do alot of excercising on my road to recovery - jogging, running or weight lifting would cause me to flair. Now that Im better and pain free I can do these things again but started out really slowly to see what I could and could not do. Running and weight lifting can be hard on your pelvic floor.

Anonymous said...

I'm not so sure about your PT. I would place a call or email to the girls at pelvic pain rehab and run the whole dilator thing by them. As far as I know, dilators are not used by the top PTs. It sure wouldn't hurt to call and get a second opinion from Stephanie or Liz at www.pelvicpainrehab.com