I'd been healing through pelvic pain with yoga before I knew I needed healing from pelvic pain. You could literally sell me any self-massage device even though I already have them all and just about any alternative or experimental "feel good" product so that I could just feel normal for once. I would spend every last dime I had - to feel good! If you have never dealt with chronic pain you probably won't really know what I mean by that. The pain in my lower back has always been sciatica to me. Shockingly, I've just become aware that there are more nerves and muscles than the sciatic nerve and pirirformis muscle that can dysfunction 'down there'.
The pain originates deep in my buttocks, radiates through my left hip and groin, lower left abdomen and down my left leg right all the way to the last two toes. I've experienced varying degrees of this pain over the last few decades, but somehow I always managed to motor on - until I wasn't able to. I woke up on Family Day 2021, and holy crap - the pain was excruciating. It felt like my leg was being electrocuted. I was unable to position myself to make it go away. I couldn't think of anything else besides how much pain I felt. I left a voicemail for my doctor and got on the internet and started to book acupuncture, massage, chiropractic care, the whole nine! While the acupuncture and massage I got that day helped some, I could not sit down, stand and lay without feeling the most intense and unbearable pain. I got in to see my doctor the following day and he wrote me a script for some anti-inflammatory drugs and pain killers - opioids - which I hate but seriously needed to function at all.
I am waiting on an MRI, which is about a 6 week wait - but my my physiotherapist is calling it like she sees it - pelvic floor hypertonicity. The likely culprit, my obturator internus! Apparently that muscle isn't functional at all on the left side of my body and is spasm and unable to let go. If you don't know anything about pelvic physiotherapy, well, you just don't know. It gets very personal.
I've suffered from back pain for as long as I can remember - It's just something that I've learned to live with but I feel like I just found a key piece to the puzzle and have a new found sense of hope despite my new found limp.
I've always found stretching the piriformis muscle helpful so I will keep at it as well as deep pelvic breathing to help release my OI that might be holding onto everything else, starting with my piriformis!
The pain in my ass has literally got on my last nerve - pun intended!
UPDATE: A year later, it turns out I have some serious back issues. I knew I had a slipped vertebrae for many years, so there is that, add slipped/bulging disks, osteoarthritis and moderate to severe spinal stenosis. I'm happy to say I didn't take too many of those opioids and that the nerve pain has subsided substantially. I did undergo several very uncomfortable and nerve-racking nerve block and facet joint injections at the pain clinic on a couple of occasions. Understandable, as my nerves were literally being crushed and was told I would need surgery (which may be true at some point). I was the youngest person being treated there and they actually thought my mother, who had to drive me to the appointment due to the inability to use my left leg after treatment, was the patient. I still have a lot of hypertonicity in my pelvic floor but I am a patient at one of the most prestigious pelvic physiotherapy clinics in the province and have a team of orthopedists, neurologists, anesthesiologists, urogynecologists, physiatrists and many other therap 'ists' looking out for me now. I am in the market for a female general practitioner, however, if you know one in my area. I feel that the only one I had ever known had failed me by making me think all my pain was in my head all this time. It's somewhat comforting to know it's not. Even more comforting to know that I can heal. I will heal.
The following restorative yoga for hips sequence is very healing but I am going to need to work on sequences for relaxing, and eventually strengthening, my pelvic floor. And maybe, just fucking maybe, I will learn to not hold onto so much fucking trauma in my body. I will learn to let the fuck go of all the unnecessary shit I am holding.
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