I've had quite bad PGP for the last month now in my groin, to the point where I can barely walk half a mile to the shop, and I have to hobble along like a little old lady taking little tiny steps. On bad days just turning around on the spot is very painful and I have to ask my husband to help me up off the sofa and put my shoes on.
I had been coping with it quite well because I had booked onto a group antenatal physiotherapy session, so I had that to look forward to - I imagined they'd give us some exercises that would alleviate the pain and make it possible to at least walk semi-normally, even though I know they can’t cure it. But the physiotherapy session was yesterday morning and I’ve just been crying pretty much ever since because it was absolutely USELESS.
They basically spent half the time focusing on how to alleviate lower back pain, which I don’t have, mine is in my groin, then told us some sleeping and sitting positions, and about keeping our legs together as much as possible when getting out of the car etc., which, fine, yeah, I have been doing that anyway (all of that was on the NHS website, which I’d already read) but tbh it feels like the equivalent of telling someone who’s broken their arm “just make sure you don’t knock it on door frames, OK? Great. Bye.” Oh also, they kept saying “it’s important to keep active” but then saying “don’t do anything that causes pain”… well it’s being active that causes me pain, that’s why I’m here..??! What a joke.
Then they gave us some exercises to do, supposedly to strengthen our pelvic muscles… Two of them seemed pretty irrelevant to me, as, again, they were for relieving back pain which I don’t have. Three of them were way too painful for me to even properly get into - and she kept saying over and over again don’t do any of these exercises if they cause any pain. Great, very useful - so half of them are off the list straight away. And the final one wasn’t painful but I don’t know what good it’s supposed to do either because she didn’t really explain and anyway it involved bouncing up and down on an exercise ball, which I don’t have. So I don’t know if it’s worth buying a ball just to do that one exercise as first of all I don’t know if the ball is actually necessary… maybe I could get the same effect from just sitting down and standing up from a chair or something, and also I don’t know if it will actually do any good or if it’ll be just like every single other thing she told us - totally irrelevant to my specific situation. (I think since PGP is an umbrella term for all sorts of different pain, everything they said seemed to be about every other type of PGP except mine. Unless I misunderstood something, it was all very rushed so that’s possible…). I just wish I’d asked these things during the session but it didn’t occur until afterwards, and anyway there wasn’t really a space for asking questions at the end, she was just like “OK, you can go now, bye.”
What makes it all the more frustrating is that it was so much effort just to even get there and I used up my daily walking capacity to go there when I could’ve gone to the shops instead.
They did say that we can make an individual appointment with them one-on-one if we still need to, but I don’t even know if it’s worth bothering with if it will be as useless as the group session was.
So I guess what I want to know is,
- Are there actually any exercises that will specifically alleviate inner-groin pain and make walking possible - or even bearable again?
- Are there any movements or activities that will actually cause lasting damage, or is it just pure discomfort without actual damage? (Eg. say if I were to run to get out of the way of a speeding car in an emergency, I probably could do it, it would just be very painful and I’d pay for it for 2 days. But would it actually damage my joints or just be really annoying?)
- Will a birthing ball help in any way, or do anything that a normal chair can’t do?
- Is it actually worth seeing a physio one-on-one - is there actually anything they can do?
- Am I better off seeing a private physiotherapist?
- Will I literally just have to become virtually housebound with my husband as my live-in carer for the next three months?
- Has anyone got any success stories of successfully mitigating PGP and being able to regain some semblance of a normal life?
I’m just so p*ed off as I thought they might actually answer these questions in the session but not only did they not really answer them but they didn’t even really give us a chance to ask anything specific to our own situation.