Know your limits: Prolapse, injuries, and the internet.

The thing with hanging out on the internet is there are a lot of people who pretend to be doctors who are not, or who pass on what their doctors have advised for themselves as a gospel everyone should follow. But in health there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

Let’s go on a side quest.

Many moons ago, I was planning to live abroad a year. I had no money, having gotten though high school on government support, but I loved this little boy in Canada so I applied for a working holiday visa. I couldn’t afford health insurance, so I went to my nearest bulk-billed clinic and had a contraceptive implant put into my arm before I left Australia. What the random clinic GP failed to mention was that I couldn’t go from the contraceptive pill straight to the implant. I should have had a couple of months for my hormones to stabalise between the two. By the time I figured it out, I was in another country, barely making enough cash to survive. A Canadian doctor wanted $100 just for the consultation. I was making $10 an hour. So, I removed the implant from under my skin, and found a mate who wasn’t on contraception, who could get on it for free and pass the pills along.

I am forever grateful to her. It must have been a pain in her arse always going in for scripts and delivering my pill package to me. However, we were vastly different people with different medical needs. In Australia I’d been on the lowest dose pill available. I was a very slight person, with no history of reproductive issues. I don’t know my friend’s medical history, but our bodies are not alike at all. She was heavier than me and over a foot taller. For whatever reason, she was not prescribed the weakest pill available. By the time I left Canada a year and a half later, I had chronic headaches, severe depression, massive cysts on my ovaries, and the lining of my cervix growing over the front, so that every time it was bumped I would bleed.

If I’d personally gone to that same doctor, I’d likely have been given a different contraceptive. Because – wait for it! – I’m a different person, with a different body, different medical history and different needs.

Same goes for any other illness or injury.

Some of my friends with prolapse are still allowed to do their CrossFit with modifications, while other friends with the same condition have special trolleys to wheel their laundry baskets around because they aren’t allowed to lift more than a cup of tea for life. It’s one thing to celebrate what your body is capable of, by all means, be proud of yourself! But it’s quite another to say “I’m doing this, so it must be safe for all people.”

Prolapse is an umbrella term. There’s not just one kind of prolapse. There are a slew of muscles in your pelvis and a variety of organs that can start dropping into each other or out of the body entirely. Treatment and restrictions are going to be wildly different for a stage one uterine verses a stage four bowel prolapse, for example. They aren’t the same organs!

You’d think it would be easy to dismiss unsolicited random internet advice, but the fact is so many women feel unheard and dismissed by their doctors or receive conflicting diagnoses that they have to turn to other sufferers for guidance. One just has to consider the thousands of women suffering from failed mesh implants to see how badly our doctors sometimes do us wrong.

My healthcare professionals have given me plenty of conflicting advice. My gyno could not give two shits; she tells me women live with much worse prolapses than mine and to strengthen my body as much as possible to prevent further damage and future surgeries.  My physio, on the other hand, is caring and sympathetic but wildly underestimates what I’m capable of. If I did her workouts and nothing else, my muscles would waste away. So, I’m largely left to figure it out for myself by listening to my body, comparing the available literature on the subject and reading other people’s stories.

It would be super easy to see wild claims that I could still run or squat and then do permanent damage to myself, because I’m used to being underestimated (and not just by my physio). Add to this that prolapse can advance gradually, rather than everything collapsing at once, and a person might not know they were hurting themselves until it was too late.

There’s no cure for prolapse. Early stage prolapse can be reversed with a tonne of effort and support, but later stage can only be managed. Surgery is an option, but as it can go horribly wrong and needs to be repeated throughout a sufferer’s life, it’s not an easy solution. As with so many other injuries and illnesses, prevention and management are key. Lifestyle can be your greatest tool, or your undoing.

Where I’m going with this is: By all means listen to other people’s experiences and gather their tips. Broaden your healthcare team so you have experts of varying talents on your side, and don’t be afraid to get a second opinion or leave a doctor entirely if they make you uncomfortable or you feel unheard. Educate yourself so you know exactly where your injury is. Track your symptoms and your activity level. Knowledge is power. But you know your body best. You’re living there. If something sounds too good to be true, maybe it is.

And if you can’t (or don’t want to) push your body in the way other prolapse owners do? That’s okay! You don’t have to have sex (with your ring in or not) if you don’t feel comfortable. You don’t have to do squats – you might not be able to brace your pelvic floor that long and no amount of breathing techniques will change that. You don’t have to jog. Or lift weights. You can choose for yourself if a high fibre diet or laxatives are a better option for you personally. And none of those things are wrong or shameful.

If you find something that works for you? If you’re proud of making a milestone in your own health journey? Talk it up! Tell your story! But don’t go thinking that it’s your way or the highway. Every body is different. Even professionals can only recommend a limited amount without examining an individual, so be wary of anyone on the internet who tells you with utmost certainty what you can or should do with your body. And that includes me!

Miriam Cumming has been documenting her prolapse journey for two years now. When she’s not talking about her vagina on the internet, Miriam writes fantasy novels, plays with stickers, and practices witchcraft. She has three wonderful children and lives in Sydney with her husband and cats.