Graduation Day

It’s been a rough few weeks here in the Gillmor household. I was going to post about the various ear infections, sinus infections, GI horror illness, and colds, but then I figured the majority of the world has had the GI horror illness recently and probably didn’t need nor want to read the rehashings of our version of it here. So instead I figured I would switch to the other squeamish topic I love to talk about.

My Vajayjay.

But this is a different post. No graphic explosion stories. This is about repair. Because I have officially graduated from Vagina PT, or as it is referred to in a PC world as Pelvic Floor Rehab.

This has been a long journey. 15 months since the original trauma. 9 months since I was referred to PT. For a few months in the middle I was going to a specialized clinic where I was getting weekly injections of steroids/muscle relaxers directly into the damaged muscle. That part was super awesome, and probably the closest I’ve come to losing my sometimes shaky hold on sanity throughout this process.

After all of this, you would think I would be cracking open the champagne and running around the house celebrating. And I am happy, believe me, but there is also a surprise emptiness that hit me as I left my PT’s office.

My pelvic floor pain has been with me since Cameron was born. Obviously. His birth, a traumatic one on many levels, was the start of a huge paradigm shift in my life. The past 15 months have been  full of more changes than I ever could have imagined. My pain has been my constant. It has been my security. And as I try to wade through my brain and figure out why after 15 months of pain I’m not running around shrieking with glee, it is because of the loss of my constant.

Around the time they finally figured out what was going on and I began PT, we knew my dad was going to have to go in for surgery. He had been given a similar timeline of recovery as I was given, something that was totally unrealistic on both fronts. But he and I would discuss the upcoming six months; we were in a race for a pain free life.

Pain free life. A seductive tease of riches. A promise of healing and recovery. For him an impossibility. For me, an unrealistic dream of perfection; as if the whole thing had never happened.  But it did. And while I am relatively pain free now with many more pain free days than painful days, I won’t ever be back to normal. My pelvic floor muscles were ripped through and while they heal, the damage is there. It is my weak spot. As my PT put it, whereas other people get pain in their shoulders and back with stress or fatigue, I’ll get mine in the vajayjay.  Insert your own joke here, everyone at work did.

But with the ending of my PT, I am ending a significant chapter in my life. I’m ending a battle I shared with my dad. I’m ending a weekly meeting with the only person who truly understood what I was going through and whose job it was to sit there and listen to me talk about it as she fixed it.

So I begin. A life not shadowed by pain. A life of realizing I am not actually broken anymore, just refurbished. Upgraded.

And for all of that I got a graduation present from my PT.

I spent 9 months in physical therapy. 9 months of, at times, pure torture, and all I got was this t-shirt.