)
“I have practiced sports since I was a child and after pregnancy, I feared having to give it up forever: urine leaks were becoming an unmanageable problem.”
I am young and I have always prided myself on following a healthy lifestyle: from food to physical activity, I was very careful in taking care of myself.
When I got pregnant I was the happiest woman in the world, I faced pregnancy as a new adventure and when Alessandro was born I didn’t think I could be happier than that. Obviously, with the passing of the months, I slowly returned to physical activity, restoring my training routine. But I happened to have small involuntary losses of urine doing the exercises at home, hence the idea of returning to the gym got more and more far away.
Of course, I knew that after giving birth the muscles of the pelvic floor stretch and get weaker, but I believed that at some point the situation would return to normal. So I tried to buffer the urine leaks with normal sanitary towels (which I was forced to change at least 4 times a day) and to postpone as much as possible the thought of having real urinary incontinence problems. But the day I wet my pants while I was playing with my son something happened: I immediately made an appointment with my doctor because I could no longer bear this situation.
He advised me to do the so-called “Kegel exercises” (obviously with an empty bladder). You have to contract the muscles, imagining having to urinate, “hold” the flow for five seconds and then relax again, doing ten repetitions a couple of times a day. If only I had known it before I would have saved myself the inconvenience and embarrassment of the past eleven months!
Now I am finally returning to my daily life, I have resumed my lifestyle and doing light activities (also being careful to avoid positions and movements in which the bladder tries). I started using specific sanitary pads for female urinary incontinence. Which, despite what I thought, work much better than normal sanitary pads. I know it will take time but I am super determined and, above all, I feel comfortable again with myself and with others.