Esther Vaughan

The first useful thing anyone gave me was a number on a handset. It came from a perineometer, a small pressure sensor that reads what a pelvic floor muscle is actually doing, and the physiotherapist turned the screen towards me so I could watch it while I squeezed. The reading was low. She said so plainly, wrote it down, and told me she would measure it again in six weeks. I was forty-one, three years into a symptom I had been told was ordinary, and it was the first time anything about it had been measured rather than estimated across a desk.

Before that appointment there had been three others. “It is extremely common after two babies.” “Everything looks normal, so I would try not to worry about it.” “Give it time, your body has been through a lot.” Every one of those sentences was said gently, by someone with more training than me, and every one of them ended the conversation. I teach PE for a living and run with a club at weekends, so I knew exactly what I had stopped doing and when, and I still walked out of all three appointments half convinced I was making a fuss. That is the part I want other people to recognise faster than I did.

What followed was sixteen weeks of prescribed work: contractions counted in sets, progressed on a schedule, checked at reviews, and mostly done alone at home with a printed sheet. It largely worked. Not entirely, and not permanently, because I still let the maintenance slide in a busy term. This site is the record I kept while it happened.

Which brings me to what I am not. I am a teacher, not a clinician, and there is a long list of things I am unqualified to tell you: what is causing your symptoms, whether your pelvic floor is weak or overactive, whether the programme that suited me would suit you, whether an internal examination is the right next step for you, or whether physiotherapy is even the treatment your symptoms need. Those are all assessment questions, and I am not an assessment. A specialist pelvic health physiotherapist, Bethan Rowsell, marks up every article here before it goes up, which is how the clinical detail stays right while the story stays mine.