I ended up with hemorrhoids over the Easter weekend.

This is a super personal one today, it’s a personal essay but also a part of my continued postpartum story. If you’re new here, for context, you may wish to read about my postpartum experience here.

A lot of this essay is about my physical recovery and about exercise. There is a lot of ‘stuff’ online about taking it slow and not bouncing back postnatally and I have had lots of well meaning people, over the last few years, suggest that I just stick to low impact movement, like yoga. I do explain more in the main essay but I want to state here, too, that it is not a safe or practical thing for me to just do low impact exercise. In order for me to be well and to be regulated, I really do need to move my body in more intense ways. This is very personal to me and is in no way an opinion on what others should do to recover post-birth.

Sending love ❤️

I ended up with hemorrhoids over the Easter weekend. It was the end of my March training block with the amazing Elizabeth of This Woman Lifts1 and we’d been focusing on pause squats2. Weightlifting had been feeling quite good for a few months prior and in February I’d even managed four whole weeks of back squats at a weight I’d felt scared to try for some years now. So I felt good about the pause squats. I felt confident. In not just my ability - my confidence there has never waivered - but my confidence in my body.

Except my body wasn’t ready for the holding.

Three seconds at the bottom under tension.

I tried changing it up each week, trying different things to make it easier - reducing the weight on the bar, shortening the length of the pause - but each week I experienced increased symptoms. Sometimes hip pain, or a heaviness in my vagina, a swollen vulva maybe, cramps and slight bleeding outside of menstruation or ovulation. One weekend I walked round and round London with and and I needed ibuprofen and to stick toilet roll in my pants to keep going. And then, on the last weekend of the training block, I got hemorrhoids.

To say I’m heartbroken about the whole month would be an understatement.

All of the confidence of the month before has been lost.

I just feel - hopeless?

Like three and a half years post-birth and I can’t just move my body the way I want to.

I’m scared it won’t ever get better and I’m scared that I don’t know it’s not working until I’ve pushed it too far. I’m scared that I no longer know what ‘too far’ is and that I get there a lot sooner than I can understand.

When this happens I feel scared. And the fear leads to more tension in my already overtight pelvic floor which leads to more pain and worse symptoms and I have been going round and round and round this cycle for some years now.

Until I stop, for a few weeks or a month and reassess and start again. Just starting and breaking and stopping and starting over and over and over again.

Before my second pregnancy I used to be able to squat my body weight. I used to be able to jump on boxes over and over and I used to run. And run and run. I used to train for hours and hours each week, I’d wake Hen up at 5:30am to get ready and be at the gym for 7am before school. Even after I gave birth, once my scar was cauterised the first time, I could run for miles and miles and come back and do hundreds of burpees all at once. I felt good. I felt strong. I felt like I knew where I was in myself.

It’s a weird thing to think about. Working out like that. Part of it was definitely to look a certain way. To hold thin/ fit/ fitting the box privilege. I feel that lost privilege now almost every day. But a lot of it was because it felt good, because it made me feel like a human. I didn’t know it at the time but I think it’s an intrinsic autistic need for me to move my body in these intense ways. Without this kind of exercise, my edges disappear. I feel less confident about who or what or where I am.

I forget myself. I think I struggle with both my vestibular sense - my sense of balance - and my proprioception - where my body is in space - and lifting heavy weights or doing high impact exercise provides me with increased input for these senses. It quite literally helps me to know where I am in the world and without it I genuinely struggle to know. This lack of knowing comes with increased stress, anxiety and overwhelm as I work harder to find my edges without that increased input.

I had surgery when Han was 11 months old and I don’t think I’ve ever really recovered from it. I had the surgery because all of the mess of unnecessary intervention after her birth had left me with a hole right next to my clitoris and honestly, I just couldn’t cope with it. All of the scar tissue was sore and rubbed and hurt. I could move and I was fine, I guess, but I also really wasn’t fine.

So in September 2021, I had it all cut away and put back together again and I just don’t think my pelvic floor could cope with so much going on in such a short timeframe. I tried to go back ‘to normal’ - I continued running and entered races and running helped ease my anxiety and the overstimulation of returning to work post-pandemic. But my hip pain got worse and worse, I couldn’t climb the stairs properly, I constantly felt like I had thrush - like an awful itching burning in my vulva - despite not showing any signs of infection when I had tests.

I paid for some private physio but I just felt scared and there were no hard and fast answers.

So I just stopped.

I haven’t ran since April 2022.

In fact, I’ve struggled to make any meaningful progress with any sort of medium to high impact exercise for over two years now.

The entire of my ‘down there’ - my labia, my perineum, my bum, all of it really - feels like a big, sore, open wound

It hurts when I have sex. It hurts every day, really, at some level.

I’m not sharing this for medical advice. I know all of the things. I do need long term help from a pelvic health physio but my GP can’t refer me directly to them and I can’t bear being sent back to gynaecology in order to ask for a referral. I don’t have the capacity to go to the GP and fight some more. The trauma from doing that for more than two years after Han’s birth is too raw. Plus I’m heavier now and that just brings a whole added element to it.

I’m sharing really because I think it’s important. I think lots of us struggle with chronic pain and health issues for a long time (even forever) after birth and I think we’ve been silenced. Because it’s too much or it’s scary or it’s embarrassing.

And I’m sharing really because, what else am I to do? I’m sharing in the hopes that writing it down and speaking it out will make it feel less sad in my body. Less heartbreaking, deep grief crying out, pouring out on the bathroom floor and more purposeful. I’m sharing to try to find purpose in this experience. Like it might save someone else, if not me.

And I’m sharing in the hopes that you will find it safe to share too.

Because feeling like you’re alone - feeling like you’re the only one STILL broken - is the worst feeling ever. And I want you to know that I am here ❤️.

Till next week,

P.S. I wanted to share some resources but I’m tired so here are just a few to get you started. I am super happy to chat to you though, if you have specific questions, you can always email me at zoe@postpartummatters.co.uk

• My wonderful friend, pelvic health physio and CIC director Suzanne runs her own non-profit - Know Your Floors - all around pelvic health, you should check her out. I particularly enjoy her relaxation Squeeze Along here.

• This podcast episode on pelvic pain from Why Mums Don’t Jump is also really good.

P.P.S.

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