Carolyn Marthanoir - Pelvic Pain Game Changer: 6 Steps to a Healthier You

6 STEPS TO
A HEALTHIER YOU

CAROLYN MARTHANIR

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

Pelvic Pain Game Changer

6 Steps to a Healthier You

2021 Carolyn Marthanir

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing in partnership with Difference Press. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

ISBN 9781631950612 paperback

ISBN 9781631950629 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934155

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For all who suffer from an invisible or incurable disease seeking answers and relief. May you find comfort and joy and be free from pain.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass, West Indian Emancipation Speech (1857)

Imagine for a moment that you are going to the grocery store to pick up a few things while your daughter is taking a lesson at the dance studio. You have your cart and youre going up and down each aisle, picking up an item here and therea bag of potatoes, a jar of picklesand all of sudden you feel a sharp, stabbing pain in your abdomen and a whoosh of warm ooze exiting your body, starting to run down your legs.

Panic sets in. Oh my gosh, you think. Not now.

Making your way to the back of the store to the restrooms, you keep your legs clenched together and waddle into the bathroom stall. You look in your purse.

Thank you, Lord, you think as you pull a spare pad and wipes out of your bag. As you make your way down to the seat, it all gushes outa blood clot the size of your fist along with some blood. You stand up and begin to clean yourself up with the wipes, but then start to feel light-headed. You need to get out of there.

You stick the pad to the inside of your pantsyes, you learned that you should always wear blackand then you wrap your panties in some paper towels and carefully place it inside your purse. Washing your hands, you look up at the mirror. You look pale, like a ghost. Yes, you feel like youre dying, or maybe you are already half-dead.

Why cant doctors figure out what is wrong with me? You wonder. This cant be normal. You exit the bathroom and find your cart waiting for you. Thankfully, you never made it to the freezer or refrigerator sections, or all your frozen food would be melting. You leave the cart, as now you have lost your appetite. In fact, you feel a bit nauseous and are not in the mood to finish your shopping. There is a pizza place next to the dance studio, so you can pick up a pizza for the kids to eat.

While you are sitting in your car, waiting for your daughters class to be over, you look at the calendar on your phone. Its the tenth, and your period doesnt normally start until the twentieth. What is going on?

Your daughter walks up to the car and gets in. She instantly sees that you arent okay and asks, Whats wrong? You tell her what you always tell her: that your stomach hurts and you just need to lie down for a little bit. You start the car and make your way home.

Once you are safely home, the kids are naturally happy to have pizza and you make your way upstairs to the bathroom. There, you open the medicine cabinet. Most homes have the little mirrored cabinet by the sink, but not you. Your medicine cabinet is two of the three shelves of what most people would use as a linen closet, showcasing your collection of the various medications that doctors prescribed to treat your symptoms. However, you just grab the ibuprofen and take four capsules, change your pants, and lie down on the bed with your heating pad. You can feel the pain radiating down your legs, almost in waves. You close your eyes and internally rock with the waves, go with the flow, and be with your pain. You ask your body, Whats wrong? But it doesnt answer. Clearly, its upset about something. You wonder, What did we do to upset the applecart today?

An hour later, you wake up to the sound of your husband coming into the room. Whats going on? he asks, and you can tell by the sound of his voice that he is frustrated, probably due to the fact that he came home from work to find the kids, who are eleven and eight, eating pizza, camped out in front of the television while you are upstairs in bed, curled up in the fetal position with your heating pad.

The truth is, you cant answer the question, What is going on? because you dont know the answer. The doctors dont seem to know. All you know is what you feel and that is all you can share.

You tell him about the episode in the grocery store, and that you noticed that your cycle is off. But the thing is, you have been telling him similar stories ever since your daughter was born eight years ago. The episodes are just becoming more frequent and more painful. Hes getting tired of it, and so are you.

So, what are you going to do about it? he asks.

Im going to call the doctors office in the morning and see if I can get in. Maybe we will get some answers this time. You can only hope and pray because you have been down this road before. You have been to dozens of different doctors, had dozens of lab tests, and did dozens of pelvic exams that left you feeling violated and in pain, and they accomplished no results. You are just not sure how much longer you can meander down this path.

You are tired.

You are tired of the pain.

You are tired of the doctors appointments and the poking and prodding.

You are tired of not getting any answers.

You are tired of the judgments, of being labeled as lazy, no fun, energy-draining, unreliable, fat, angry, or depressed.

You are tired of strangers asking, When is your baby due? and you are not even pregnant.

If only these people could spend a day in your body and feel what you feel, and experience what you experience. Then they might understand. But this isnt their game to play - its yours. We must play with the cards we are dealt, just like we cant change the structure or sequence of our DNA. However, we do have the ability to influence the expression of our genes. Its all in how you play the cards you are dealt.

That is why I wrote this book: to help women, who feel helpless with undiagnosed chronic pelvic pain and to share with them what I have learned to find the cause and the remedy to their pain.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Henry David Thoreau , Walden, Economy (1854)

I consider myself an average female American, with a relatively humble upbringing. I was born in the great potato state of Idaho, the first of four children born to parents of Swiss-German and Baltic ancestry. I was raised with familial traditions. My fathers family came to America with a Catholic monk in the 1890s, and I graduated from the only Catholic high school in Idaho. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that after graduating from high school, I would get married and have kids, but I had an incredible sense of wanderlust and had only been to seven of the fifty statesIdaho and its surrounding states. Getting married and having kids seemed boring. Everybody does that, I thought. I knew there was a much bigger world out there and I wanted to travel and experience the places that I read about in books or saw on the big screen.