Postpartum Recovery After Birth: A North Jersey Mom's Guide to Pelvic Floor Rehab

When a woman delivers vaginally, her pelvic floor muscles stretch 3 times their original length. Imagine that! THREE TIMES !! No other muscle in the human body goes through such duress.

If your labor lasts long, especially the second stage, and if you have any tearing or laceration, or an episiotomy, the injury is now compounded.

While in some women things go back to somewhat normal over time, in some they don't. Both these groups of women will undergo some amount of leaking (urine or feces or gas or a combination of these or all of these), pelvic pain, pain with bowel movements, pain with intercourse, urinary urgency frequency, and pain and/or numbness with sitting. How long this persists can be variable. Any symptom lasting more than 12 weeks is worth looking into.

Having said that, the sooner we start taking care of the pelvic floor, the better and faster results we get. This is because not only can healing be delayed and interrupted, but our brain can establish wrong patterns and behaviors around these injuries that outlast the recovery itself.

This is how many women end up having urge urinary incontinence or dyssynergic defecation - wrong patterns even after the body has healed.

Pudendal neuralgia is a common injury related to birth, and so is OASIs (obstetric anal sphincter injuries) and deserve special mention (both their own blog topics, and both worth talking about as may get unnoticed and undiagnosed for a long long time!)

Even women with C-section need love and care - do you know how many layers of your body get cut during C-section??!!! What you see on the surface is literally the tip of the iceberg.

C-sections can lead to bladder urgency frequency, lower abdominal pain, and pain with intercourse, besides back and hip pain. C-section is a major surgery, a major life event. Imagine having a shoulder replacement surgery and being told to take care of the dishes the next day. We don't do that, do we?So why should women with a major abdominal surgery be treated differently ? This needs care to avoid major health issues like placenta accreta, where the scar tissue becomes adherent to the uterus and can pose a risk to the mother and fetus.

So no matter how you gave birth, post partum recovery is important and should NOT be optional. Let us stop looking at post partum health as a luxury, and start looking at it like the medical necessity that it is.

If you are looking for a reliable trustworthy pelvic floor physical therapist, check us out on https://www.pelvicptplus.com/ and we will be happy to help you!