The Pelvic Floor Is a Problem

"I was settling into one of those airport activity tables with high stools and electric outlets at my flight's gate, waiting for the agent to announce boarding, when I felt a gathering storm at the apex of my butt cheeks. This was my last flight after being away from home on a book tour in May. For the past two weeks, I hadn't left my chair much, due to all the posting, podcasting, writing, and tense, nervous scrolling that releasing a book involves."

"I'd even made a point of walking to the bookstores from hotels and back, to indulge some kind of Walt Whitman-esque fantasy. But now, at the last moment, alarm bells were going off. The pain felt as if I'd taken a hard hit to my tailbone, as I'd once done after going off a jump in an inner tube and landing ass-first on hard-packed snow. But there was no incident to ascribe the pain to. It had arrived unbidden."

"I spent the flight lurched forward in my seat, weight shifted all the way onto one leg, rocking back and forth as much as I could without looking like I was experiencing a religious hallucination. By the time I had to stand up, it was all I could do to not cry out-as bad as the pain was sitting down, standing up sent a radical guitar solo through my coccyx."

"At that time, I was about four months postpartum from delivering my first baby, and had had a blissful recovery, all things considered. I had pelvic muscles of steel, thanks to over a decade of lifting heavy weights, a practice I continued until two weeks before giving birth. I had only been back to lifting for a couple of months-deadlifts, squats, bench, overhead press, here and there some rows or lat pull-downs-but everything had been going well."

I was settling at an airport gate when sudden, severe coccyx pain flared while preparing to board after a book tour. Prolonged chair time during two weeks of intense promotion preceded the onset. The pain resembled a hard hit to the tailbone without any precipitating incident and intensified while sitting and standing. During the flight I shifted weight and rocked to alleviate discomfort but rising produced sharp, guitar-like pain through the coccyx. The episode occurred about four months postpartum after a largely smooth recovery. Years of heavy lifting had built strong pelvic muscles, and I had resumed weightlifting a few months earlier.

Read at WIRED