Long road to recovery

With each child, my recoveries have been different. With Katelyn, I had pelvic pain and a keloid scar form at the incision. I didn’t know what either one was or what to do about it, so I did nothing…for months.

Abby’s was probably the best recovery to date. My doctor did steroid injections during surgery to reduce the severity or occurrence of another keloid. Pelvic pain was minor, if at all, so I didn’t feel the need to hunt down a good chiropractor to fix it.

J’s is another story. Keloid has been avoided (so far) with steroid injects during surgery and pelvic pain is non-exsistant thanks to an awesome chiropractor I saw throughout my pregnancy. The major hiccup was a torn internal stitch.

I’m not sure how I did it, or even when, but at some point the right end of my incision started hurting. A burning, pinching, pulling type of pain. I thought it was the staples but when I told my doc, he examined me only to discover some swelling above the corner of my incision–an indication of tearing of the internal incision.

“Take it easy,” he says. Boy, if I had a dollar for every time he told me that…

At my two week check, I complain again about the pain. He advises me to wear a support band to put pressure on it and, you guessed it, take it easy.

The support band sucks. The only time it helps is when I was standing/walking, which I tried to do little of. Otherwise, it bunches up, making things even more uncomfortable. So that didn’t last long.

Instead, I walked around with my hand pressed to my lower stomach and walked with my right foot raised on my tippy toes to reduce stretching in that area. It was fun. For nearly five weeks.

Then it suddenly stopped hurting and swelling disappeared. But that was just to make way for sudden redness and swelling of the surrounding area of the incision. (Different than the torn stitch swelling).

Another unplanned trip to see the doc. “Oh my,” was his reaction to seeing the new mess I was in. It looked like an infection…but didn’t. It looked bruised…but didn’t. So, another round of antibiotics for this mama, just to make sure.

Two days later, the swelling reduced as did the redness.

By six weeks post-partum, I was relatively pain and swelling free. Therefore, I could sleep and move better AND I didn’t have any more pills to swallow.

Bonus.

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