I normally wouldn't write about this stuff. But I think I need to say it, because I am again frustrated by someone who thinks that pregnancy is nothing. I wrote this last time this came up, and while I'm not currently in this state now, it will happen again.
I will warn for some very graphic descriptions of biology. That's only fair.
But this is what a pregnancy can leave behind. I wasn't ever sick enough to require hospitalization. They sent me home with all three within 24 hours of giving birth.
I stood up from my chair, walked out of the room, and went and sat down elsewhere and performed a very basic biological function. I cleaned myself off, stood up, and reached up to the cabinet for the antibiotic ointment, because my perineum tore again. I didn't need to look at the toilet paper for the bright red blood, or feel along my perineum for the tear. This is not new. This is very familiar. I have lived with the scar splitting open often for nine years. I'll tell my husband I can't have sex, I tore again. I'll swear gently for a few days every time I pee, because the urine stings in the open wound. Beneath the scar I can feel the gap in one layer of the muscle. Had I not been in a Western country last time, I would have had a fistula. I very nearly have one as it is. Every time I take a crap I must reach down and support my perineum against the strain with my fingers. The muscle doesn't quite work right any more.
I lie on the bed and carefully contract my abdominal muscles, drawing them tight, holding them til they quiver. I know that sit ups are advised to strengthen the abdominals, but I won't do them for the same reason I avoid sitting in booths at restaurants. My pelvis is loose at the front. The symphysis pubis often loosens during pregnancy, nature's way of getting just a few more millimeters, a little more play, into the pelvic ring before childbirth. Mine just never resolidified. So I can't do a full situp. Just these isometric contractions, hoping that enough of them will strengthen my abs so that my back doesn't hurt so much. Not that I will ever have flat abs again. Not without surgery. A finger-wide gap can be felt in them all the way down my belly, and no amount of exercise can ever fix that. That would take surgery. So would tightening the skin that sags from my belly. I have to choose how I dress to hide it. It's not just no bikinis. It's nothing ever fitted through the body.
I'm walking pretty well today. I got new pads for my TENS unit. They go on either side of my spine, under my jeans on the sacroiliac joint. It isn't right, either. Perhaps it's due to the way I carried the last baby, or the birth itself, or just side effects from the pubic joint's disunion. But it's wrong enough to be nearly crippling in pain as the muscles spasm, trying to make things right.
I need to stand a lot right now, though, because last week I couldn't do anything. The laundry's backed up, and there are dirty dishes in the sink, a general disorder pervading the house. I get to decide between two lousy options one week a month. One is to be stoned. Plenty of muscle relaxants and narcotics, enough to make me sleepy, waking only to stagger into the bathroom and pee, stagger back into the bedroom, uninterested in eating, only sleep. The other is to pace the house, weeping in pain, gagging with the force of the spasms. I strip naked to get the clothing off the skin of my back and my belly. They are hot with effort as the muscles spasm. It is as bad as labor. Maybe worse. Labor had a point, an ending. I can't eat, can't sleep. I realize I am crying in pain when the tears drip onto my chest, and stagger stifflegged to the bathroom to wash my face. But I am racked by another contraction, pure white heat of pain that blanks out thought, and I stumble against the wall, earning another bruise on arm and hip. When the pain ends, in three days, it is only a deceptive lull of quiet bleeding. I cannot lift. I cannot stand very long. Much beyond absolute indolence will set off the violent cramps again. I am under this restriction for four more days. Seven days a month I lose to this. It wasn't like this before I had children.
I saw a pregnant woman in the mall yesterday, and my stomach lurched. Perhaps I have a little PTSD, now. I vomited everything I ate for four months. I make jokes it was the only diet I ever stuck to and lost weight. Last night I was pregnant again in my dreams. I woke, sweating and shaking, and rubbed the scar from my tubal ligation as though it were a talisman against evil, stood up, and went in the bathroom to look at it in the light, pressing my hands against my belly. No hard lump of uterus, nothing moving inside me. Nothing to fear. You're done. Never again.