Ever Since I Had My Baby Understanding, Treating, and Preventing the Most Common Physical After-Effects of Pregnancy and Childbirth

Recognizing Your Postreproductive Problem INCONTINENCE, PROLAPSE, SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION, AND OTHER COMMONLY OVERLOOKED CONDITIONS The reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth.Aristotle Why didn't anyone tell me about this problem ten years ago?Linda, age forty-one, considering surgery "What's happened down there?" you've asked yourself, as have so many other women from time immemorial. Ever since that wondrous day you gave birth--for the first time or the fifth--your body has never felt quite the same. Was it embarrassment over the loss of urine you first noticed while lifting your child, laughing with your friends, or making a run to the bathroom? Was it your growing self-consciousness about controlling your bowel movements or gas? Or maybe it was your worry that sex didn't feel the same as it once did, and that your partner's satisfaction might have changed also. "I feel way too young for this!" you've told yourself while mothering, working, exercising, nurturing relationships, and striving for a full and active life. Yet more and more, you've found that these problems really can't be ignored, because they're making you less active, your life less complete. Never, at this stage in life, had you anticipated such challenges to your sense of control, intimacy, and self-image, conditions that make you feel terribly alone and abnormal. What might the response be if you mentioned these problems to your peers? More likely than not, their eyes would light up with interest and affirmation. Many of them have these problems, too. What's happened down there for you and many other women are the effects of pregnancy, labor, and delivery--of forceps, episiotomies, and a newborn's head, shoulders, arms, and legs--on your pelvic muscles, nerves, bladder, bowel, and vagina. They are long-term problems of the pelvic floor that modern obstetrics has overlooked in its efforts to make delivery safe and comfortable in the short term. Leaking, bulging, soiling, sexual dissatisfaction--women of past generations rarely complained about these "inevitable costs" of childbirth. After all, what could be done? A New Chapter Within the book of women's health, you've turned the first page of a new chapter whose time is overdue. Call it urogynecology, female pelvic medicine, or postreproductive women's health. By any name, it is finally centered on the female conditions that so often follow the most wonderful and dramatic physical event of your lifetime: childbirth. You've learned of the many ways to prevent and treat problems such as heart disease, breast cancer, and osteoporosis. But you've heard little about the countless ways to prevent and treat the physical effects of childbirth. From this chapter forward, you'll hear a great deal. Along the winding road between childbirth and menopause, scores of women are affected by physical symptoms that often attest to the extraordinary physical demands of pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Some of these postreproductive changes are immediately apparent, affecting the quality of a woman's most vigorous years; other anatomic changes have no repercussions until decades later. Whether these physical transitions are subtle or severe, immediate or delayed, they are more common--and fortunately, more treatable--than you might think. Incontinence, prolapse, and pelvic and sexual problems are no longer the unspoken and inevitable costs of motherhood. "Mom takes care of everyone, but who takes care of Mom?" The average working mother spends one and a half hours each day shuttling kids around, two hours preparing food and straightening the house, and what often seems like twenty-five hours listening to everybody else's problems! The time has arrived to better understand one of the most important phGoldberg, Roger is the author of 'Ever Since I Had My Baby Understanding, Treating, and Preventing the Most Common Physical After-Effects of Pregnancy and Childbirth', published 2003 under ISBN 9780609808726 and ISBN 0609808729.