I had an interesting appointment with the vaginatherapist today.
And believe it or not, the things we learned had absolutely nothing to do with my vagina.
In fact, it’s almost misleading to continue to call her the vaginatherapist, because the truth is – the last few appointments we haven’t been focused on my lady bits at all.
Don’t tell the devirginator that though… I’m pretty sure he gets through his days by chuckling at the thought of me getting PT for my cootchie.
And it’s not even that the PT for my cootchie is no longer necessary. It’s just that the vaginatherapist is kind of great in the fact that she doesn’t necessarily believe the issues down there are symptomatic only of complications down there.
She happens to think it’s all (as in – the body as whole) a little more linked than that. And given the fact that I have past injuries that also seem to be tying into some of the pain I have (namely – 3 cracked vertebrae’s when I was 18, and a broken tailbone when I was a kid), she has started working on pinpointing where exactly some of my muscle dysfunctions are originating from. She thinks it’s all connected (the down there muscle spasms and low back pain included). Even though those other injuries haven’t really bothered me at all in quite some time (I hadn’t thought about the fact that I once busted my tailbone in ages), she believes that between my surgeries and the endo – the perfect storm occurred to recruit those other injuries into the mix and make it all a big jumbled mess.
One where some of my muscles don’t seem to be working at all, and others seem to be working overtime in order to overcompensate.
Basically, the vagina therapist thinks that if we can pinpoint the line where all these issues are being connected, we can work from there out to alleviate the dysfunction.
I know I’m doing a crap job of explaining this, but I promise you – when she explains it to me, it makes perfect sense.
And this is why the vagina therapist has spent a lot my time analyzing my back over the last few weeks rather than my… well, my vagina.
Today she had me stripped down to a sports bra and shorts though, as she was poking around on my back and asking me to perform various movements. The goal of course being that she wanted to be able to feel how the muscles in my back were working together (or not working together) as I was doing them.
When I was performing one relatively simple bending forward motion, I felt a sharp pain in my back. So just as she had requested, I let her know that whatever I was doing hurt.
“Where?” she asked.
I immediately responded with “Right where you’re poking.” I could feel her finger on my spine, and it just so happened to be exactly where the sharp pain was occurring.
I was sure she must be able to feel some tightness there.
But she sounded confused and said “The whole area?”
And I said “No. Just right where your finger is. It’s isolated right there in that spot.”
Still confused, she said “Which spot?”
And I, now frustrated, repeated again “Right where your finger is!”
She paused for a second and then came around to face me. She asked how many fingers I thought she had on my back. I am pretty sure I looked at her like she was an idiot before saying “One. Maybe two, but if it was two they were pushed right up next to each other.” I then demonstrated what I meant by holding out my pointer and middle finger crossed one right over the other.
She looked at me for a second like she was trying to assess how much I really believed this. And then she formed her hand into a claw-like gesture with all 4 fingers spread wide apart. She said “This is how I had my fingers on your back. Each finger on a different vertebrae. Could you really not feel that?”
Now I was questioning myself. Surely I felt that and just got confused, right?
“Do it again.” I said – thinking that of course I would feel the difference now that I knew what she was doing.
But when she put her hand on my back again, all I could feel was the pressure of one finger.
Maybe 2.
Certainly not 4.
And definitely not spread across my entire lower back.
She began actually poking my back with just 1 finger. Questioning with each movement when I could and couldn’t feel it. When she was working with just 1 finger, I was able to tell every time she touched my back – no matter where she was touching. But there was a definite difference in how I felt those pokes. In certain areas of my back, it was like I was aware of the pressure but couldn’t feel the actual touch. Kind of like how your mouth feels after a trip to the dentist. You can tell when you’re touching your jaw, but not because you actually feel the touch.
That’s exactly how this was.
And any time she had more than one finger on me, I couldn’t tell how many she was using or how close or far apart they were placed. It kind of always just felt like one finger to me – like all the different pressures combined into a single sensation.
After playing around with the different vertebrae’s for a while and almost testing my ability to tell what she was doing, she came around and faced me before saying “It’s fascinating. I’ve read studies about people with back pain whose brains actually shut off receptors in their back in an attempt to diminish the pain, but I’ve never really studied or seen it myself. Very cool.”
I had to laugh at that point. She was genuinely excited. Or maybe not excited, but definitely enthralled.
By me. And my back. And my inability to feel her fingers poking around.
I wasn’t so much enthralled. In fact, I was kind of freaked out. It made me nervous that I really hadn’t been able to feel much of what she was doing. Don’t get me wrong, when she increased pressure – I definitely felt it. And I’m not sure we ever even would have discovered this at all had it not been for the fluke of me trying to tell her where I was feeling pain while her hands were actually on me. It’s not like you could poke me in the back with a needle or lit match and I wouldn’t know. It was nothing that drastic. I still have feeling back there, it’s just… greatly reduced.
At the end of the day, this isn’t exactly a serious problem either. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose I would definitely prefer to have less receptors back there than more (since when I do have pain, it so often ends up culminating in my lower back). It’s just… weird. More than anything, it’s weird. Not necessarily anything that has to be fixed, or that points to any more serious issues beyond what we're alrea working on.
Just the body’s weird way of coping. Which I guess is kind of cool.
The only real drawback that I can see?
If I were a kid, and playing that game where someone writes something on your back with their finger and you have to guess what it is – I would lose.
Every time.
Other than that, I suppose it's not really that big of a deal.
Just this weird thing the vaginatherapist and I discovered one day when she was poking around at my back instead of my...
Well, you know.
ADSPACE
