A Kelowna physiotherapist has started a podcast to support women during pregnancy, birth preparation, and postpartum recovery.
As a working physiotherapist, Melissa Dessaulles saw many women coming in with some of the same issues after giving birth: leaking, prolapse, pain with intimacy and having difficulty getting back to exercise – all normal feelings. That’s when she decided to start Mommy Berries, a website that teaches women how to support their bodies from pregnancy to postpartum.
“Everybody knows physiotherapists treat muscles, bones and joints,” Dessaulles told Capital News. “The issues that we have after having babies are related to muscles – they’re just muscles that live inside our pelvis and they have embarrassing jobs.
“The pelvic floor and our core muscles are responsible for so many important things like having pleasurable intercourse and allowing us to go to the washroom properly.”
Dessaulles says the biggest frustration her post-partum patients would have when they would come into the office was that there was no place they could educate themselves on how to heal their body after giving birth, a frustration she recalls feeling after she had her first child.
She launched The Pelvic Floor Project, a podcast on Mommy Berries, to help remove the stigma around having those important discussions.
“It’s like this taboo topic that no one wants to talk about,” Dessaulles explained.
The podcast allows women to maintain their privacy about what their body is going through and learn about some of the issues they are afraid to discuss, like not being able to be intimate after giving birth.
“A lot of it is just education,” the long-time physiotherapist added. “I incorporate my expertise and I speak to other healthcare professionals in hopes to help these women better understand what is happening with their bodies.
“The wheels fell off my bus after having my first baby. My friends didn’t talk about these issues; my doctor didn’t talk about it. So when I started getting the help myself, I realized healing your pelvic floor is just rehabilitating your muscles, like with any other injury on your body.”
New episodes of The Pelvic Floor Project launch every Tuesday on Mommy Berries at 5 a.m. PST. Listen here.
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