My Birth Story :: Hannah P.

We had planned to start trying to get pregnant after I defended my PhD dissertation. I had gotten off birth control 3 years earlier and the complications that followed that were beyond what I could have ever dreamed. I kept hoping the symptoms I was having would disappear as quickly as they appeared. Amidst pelvic pain that made it hard to move and pee and wear pants, Pelvic PT was my safe place. When the doctors kept telling me that nothing was wrong, my Pelvic PT helped me manage my pain and guided me on a journey of listening to and healing my body.

We started intentionally trying to get pregnant in February 2023, right after my defense. I tracked my ovulation and waited those agonizing two weeks each month wondering if maybe our little baby was in there, only to try to explain away my disappointment each month when the test was negative. Eventually I was diagnosed with endometriosis. Of course, coming to a diagnosis is never simple or linear. There were many other tentative diagnosis, scares, and unknowns. I scheduled an endometriosis removal surgery for the end of October.

What I anticipated being a 1-hour surgery turned into nearly 5. I had severe stage 3 endometriosis as well as a septate uterus. They removed the endo and cleared the wall of fibrous septum through my uterus. Recovery was hard, but as I healed, I considered that maybe the endo had protected me from getting pregnant as the septate uterus made the likelihood of a late term miscarriage quite high.

I was supposed to wait a minimum of 2 months after my surgery before trying to get pregnant again. We planned to wait longer to give my body some time to feel more healed. To our surprise in January 2024 my period was late, I took a test, and there was that little line. I had conceived almost 2 months to the day after my surgery, even while we were actively preventing.

I spent the first trimester very sick and very doubtful that things were going to go smoothly. I was shocked every time the OB told me things looked good and every time a test came back clear. After the sickness finally passed, I felt great. In addition to bimonthly appointments, I did the online birth prep program with Mojo and learned how to walk and pick up laundry baskets and properly get out of bed. I walked, swam, and did yoga up until the day before I gave birth.

At 38 and a half weeks I had to be induced following an OB appointment. I remember it was drizzling rain, and I drove to the hospital in a daze. I was told to go straight there. While I drove, I called my husband who left work to go get our hospital bags. Then my doula, Emily, crying.

I hoped for an unmedicated birth. The past 5 years of Pelvic PT had been training for this. I was so excited to see my body do it’s thing. But I was being induced, and I hadn’t really considered this scenario. The plan was to do cervical ripening all night then start Pitocin in the morning, but I started contracting too much so we spent the night trying to get the Cytotec out of my system. There was no sleeping happening. By 9 am the next morning I was exhausted. They were ready to start the Pitocin. Contractions started picking up. I was only 2 cm dilated.

Things moved very slowly. By 2 pm the contractions had really picked up, but I was only 3 cm and feeling the weight of the exhaustion. I didn’t realize it until my PT asked me after, but I was using all the strategies I had used to manage my endometriosis pain, and I was managing surprisingly well even after nearly 19 hours of contractions and no epidural. We really needed some progress, though. I wanted to avoid any extra intervention, but I knew I couldn’t keep at this for multiple days with no pain relief or sleep.  Emily suggested we walk around.

I took one very slow lap around the room with my husband trying not to trip over all my cords and suddenly my water broke.

They gave me a low dose of pain medicine through my IV for an hour. We decided we would see how I felt after that. It gave me a chance to sort of lie in the bed and fall asleep for maybe a minute at a time between contractions. As soon as that hour was up something felt different in my body… a sort of energy surge. Before I knew it, I was involuntarily pushing. Everything became a blur. We tried different positions but finally got into a squatting position on the bed with the squat bar and a blanket thrown over it. My doula held one side, and I held the other and we sort of did a tug of war each time I contracted and pushed. Pushing felt like muscle memory. I don’t know how I could have done this without all the practice in Pelvic PT. And then our perfect baby boy was here.

Just under a year before, I had been in a hospital bed not that different from this one in a lot of pain, overwhelmed by a body that felt weak and broken. I found it so hard to imagine ever being able to grow a healthy human.

I’m six months postpartum now and my body feels strong and healthy and better than I can ever remember. Our baby boy is smiley and wiggly and full of life. I’m so grateful to all the twists and turns of the past 5 years. It led me to our baby boy and it also led me back to my body and myself.

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MOJO Pelvic Health is a local, women-owned and operated team made up of Memphis’ Premier Pelvic Health Physical and Occupational Therapists. The co-founders are both pelvic health physical therapists who have been working to elevate and improve care during pregnancy and postpartum for over a decade in Memphis and have developed a mentoring and training program to educate, empower, and enable more therapists to specialize in this field. They have expanded to multiple locations and partner with some of our top OB GYN groups to make this care more accessible.

Learn more about this incredible team of women at mojoph.com or through their social media @mojopelvichealth.

If you are pregnant, you can learn more about their online Birth Prep Program at the following link. This is open to anyone and everyone, regardless of location mojo-flo.com/birth-prep