If anyone wants to make sure their teenage daughter or son doesn't become a mommy or daddy, send them my way. Basically, pregnancy broke me. I knew back pain came with pregnancy, but no one tells you about the back pain, hip pain, and pelvic pain. Apparently, the hormones partying in your body during pregnancy stretch your ligaments to prepare for child birth. This I didn't know. The hormones also made me a volcano of vomit. My first pregnancy was so bad they had to give me a special medicine to stop the vomiting. I had morning sickness all day, every day of that first pregnancy.
When I first became pregnant I had a vision of doing prenatal yoga and taking longs walks in my cute maternity workout clothes, drinking a homemade smoothie, recipe found in the baby books I would carry with me and read on a park bench. The actual vision that others saw was me bent over at a ninety degree angle attempting to walk anywhere shoving a piece of cake in my mouth. My hips and back would go out on me at any given moment. This was probably worsened by the fact that I was so sick I couldn't move, let alone take invigorating walks every day, and my muscles turned to pudding. The cake I'm sure didn't help. I don't even like cake, but it was the only thing I could eat that didn't make me sick. I ate a lot of cake those nine months. A lot, a lot of cake. The book, you ask? I trashed it.
The second pregnancy wasn't quite the same as the first. I wasn't as sick and didn't want cake, but I was still pretty miserable, or so my husband says. It was the third pregnancy that broke me once and for all. I was sick at first, but as the first months passed, I realized that eating...anything...made me feel better. It was like the more I shoved down my throat, the less likely it would be able to come back up. I was genteel at first, and would serve myself a small portion of Hamburger Helper on my plate eating it with my fork. That didn't last long. I usually abandoned plate and fork and pulled the entire skillet over to me, shoveling the beef and processed cheese into my mouth with a giant serving spoon. I was completely out of control. The beast inside of me had all the power! He still does, in fact.
It was so bad I actually got stuck in a booth in Arby's. I didn't care, though. I ate my super-sized roast beef with cheddar cheese dripping down my chin as my husband stared in fear, pushing his extra mozzarella sticks my way to appease the monster I had become.
Suffice it to say, baby number three was a whopping ten pounds. I pushed that sucker out with every last ounce of energy I had. I did NOT bounce back. My body felt like a Stretch Armstrong doll that had been stretched one too many times and would never go back to its original shape. I was so weak I couldn't even lift the car carrier without Milo in it, let alone carry him to the car and lift it into place.
So here I am, nearly three years later since Milo's birth. I've gotten some of my body back, some, but not much. Having three kids, there is a certain degree of activity that I must maintain to keep up with them. Unfortunately, I am not an exerciser. I kept in shape in my teens and 20's by doing activities that happened to also be athletic: march around a football field twirling a flag, dancing a couple nights a week, skiing, cheerleading, horseback riding. I do not run. I do not do aerobics. I have tried doing these things and they are boring as hell. (And yes, all you runners out there who talk about your times and distances and half-marathons...you're boring, too.) Unfortunately, in order to maintain some of the activities I mentioned previously, you need $$$. Especially to carry them out with three kids in tow. Instead, I walk, which burns a surprisingly and depressingly low number of calories compared to other activities. I people watch and look at gardens and houses, something you can't do while running.
Last summer I was very committed to walking every day and doing a small amount of weight training at home. I slowly (very slowly, too slowly) lost ten pounds from the beginning of May to the end of September. And while I felt better because I was fitting into my clothes again, I still had pain. A lot of pain. My upper back has been a source of pain since my first pregnancy and has been easily explained. I've always been a sloucher, so when my boobs blew up to the size of Pam Anderson's and I was constantly carrying a baby around, my muscles couldn't take it and rebelled. Unfortunately, I noticed that the hip pain I experienced during pregnancy was constantly with me last summer.
In the fall, I went to a new chiropractor. I hadn't been to one in nearly three years and I was having shoulder issues that were work related. As the weather turned bad, my walking subsided and suddenly my lower back completely went out. It had done this a couple of times before, but has always been resolved after a week of TLC. This time it did not get better. The chiropractor ordered an x-ray of my lower spine which showed permanent damage to a couple of the lower vertebrae, probably an old cheering injury, or skiing, or horseback riding. Who the hell knows??
I have been doing stretching every day and some exercises, but the pain hasn't stopped and right at this very moment, it's pretty excruciating in my lower back and hips. The chiropractor has ordered x-rays of my hips to check for arthritis (very rare for someone my age) and an MRI of my lower back. He said he's wondering if I have some "disease" where your hip sockets aren't as deep as they should be. Turns out all that ligament stretching during pregnancy that caused my hips to go out on me might not have been solely the hormones. I could have this disease that exacerbated the problem. Thanks for telling me there was such a disease, let alone hearing about it eight years and three babies (big babies!) later.
OK, so here's my confession. I haven't been as good as I should be in doing my back exercises. I stretch all the time, but I cheat. I don't hold out my stretches. And I really cheat when it comes to my strength exercises. Here is where the monthly challenge comes in. I don't really know what the future holds for me in terms of back surgery and/or hip replacement and I really don't want to think about it. I'm only thirty-seven. I still have in my mind, when we get some extra money, that we'll take ski trips and go horseback riding with our boys.
So...there is one form of exercise that I love doing and I will come up with the dumbest excuses NOT to do it...Yoga. I picked it up in college and it is the everyman's exercise. The excuses I make up? Too many Legos on the floor. The boys will bother me. I'm taking away from my husband's TV time. (That last one is the WORST! He could care less about his TV time, and any other time I have no problem interrupting him watching a show, but I have actually said that in my head as an excuse. SHAME ON ME!) Do you know that I actually have a yoga for the back DVD? It could potentially solve every pain issue I am currently having. Know how many times I've done it? Once...Once. I felt amazing after it. Know why I haven't done it since? It requires me carrying a kitchen chair downstairs to our family room. I could probably buy a cheap folding chair and keep it in the family room. That has been my sorry excuse for possibly costing me my dream of shushing down a mountainside with my boys. A frieking chair!
So, for the month of September, no more excuses. I'm going to do a yoga circuit every day for the month. After the thirty days, my hope is to find some relief and new found strength. The results of the x-ray and MRI will be in by then and hopefully there won't be any significant problems that contains the words surgery and/or replacement in the solution and I can continue with the yoga. If there is something wrong, so be it, but at least I'll know it's not because I didn't try because of a chair.
That's Part One of my September challenge...yoga to strengthen and heal my body. Part Two's goal is to strengthen and heal my heart. But, I can't write about that now because my back is killing me!!!!!!
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