Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: Pain During Pregnancy

Question:
I have always wondered if women in squatting cultures suffer as much severe pubic bone/pelvic pain as women in chair-dwelling cultures... Anyone know? Vicky exclaimed, man did [the squats] ever put pressure on the pubic bone! Squatting doesn't normally do that - so maybe her squatting *did* do something nasty at the time? I wonder if squatting on the toes has a different effect than squatting flat-footed.

Answer:
Actually, it is the couch that I use. I mistakenly said chair before. I sort of wedge myself into a corner of the couch (this particular corner is up against the wall, so there is a spot to rest my head). I have tried 3 different ways of sleeping with pillows: just up at the crotch, from crotch to feet, and crotch and knees. It seems like crotch and knees is what works best. I actually started feeling a lot better maybe an hour or two after my initial post. I really had lost it for a bit, there, but my recovery was surprisingly fast. Now I'm just plain exhausted. I will take more tylenol before finally forcing myself to hit the hay later (seriously, I've got some issues with going to bed, these days, so I tend to push it and stay up a lot). Don't know whether you've read this already, but there is some evidence that breast stimulation can help trigger labour. It only seems to work if you spend between one and three hours a day doing it, though. Sex might work as well, but I suspect you probably aren't feeling enormously like trying that (enormous being one operative word here, come to think of it, but I was thinking of the pain). Last year, I was laid off from my super-fun statistical analyst position magically about a month before we conceived, so I was probably the only pregnant woman in America who had adequate sleep in the first trimester. By around the fifth month, though, the relaxin kicked in and my hips were already tired and my legs ached and I even had some strange feelings in my abs -- that was the scary stuff -- so of course, I found a job as a cook in a nursing home, where I'd have to stand for eight hours per shift with very brief (at least during training) breaks to sit down at all. And in the evening, I was orienting ushers and doing concessions at a small theater downtown -- at least there was more sitting. And I had to run a couple errands between jobs, so by Friday, I was standing in the Kmart parking lot crying because my back hurt. By the end of the one week I did that, I looked at the stairs up to a hot shower and our bed, and I just couldn't do it. I pulled off my clothes in the front room and fell asleep on the couch downstairs, back to the back of the couch. It was the first comfortable sleep I had in a couple weeks, and my back felt a zillion times better.