When Your Pelvic Floor Feels Like It’s Dropping

Your pelvic floor is a group of muscles and other tissues that form a kind of sling across your pelvis. In women, this sling holds the uterus, bladder, bowel, and other pelvic organs in place so that they can work properly. However, pregnancy and childbirth can cause your pelvic floor to become weakened or injured. Age and obesity can also lead to the same problem, as can certain surgeries and radiation treatment.

Patients will have feelings of fullness, pelvic pressure, or the sensation that something has “dropped.” At Women’s Health Medical Group we offer a variety of treatments for pelvic support problems such as cystoceles, rectoceles, enteroceles, and vaginal vault prolapse. All of these conditions can be corrected surgically.

What are the symptoms of pelvic floor disorder?

These are the most common symptoms of most pelvic floor problems:

• Feeling heaviness, fullness, pulling or aching in the vagina
• Seeing or feeling a “bulge” or “something coming out” of the vagina
• Having frequent urinary tract infections
• Leaking urine when you a cough, laugh or exercise
• Having difficulty starting urination and fully emptying your bladder
• Feeling an urgent or frequent need to urinate
• Feeling pain while urinating
• Leaking stool
• Having difficulty controlling gas
• Being constipate
• Having a hard time making it to the bathroom in time

What causes pelvic floor disorders?

Why some women develop the condition while others do not is still a mystery. But there are some conditions that are known to influence a person’s developing pelvic floor problems.

• Pregnancy and childbirth — This area is being studied. It is thought the risk increases with the more children a woman has, but because women who have never been pregnant or deliver through C-section can still have issues, the relationship is not fully clear.

• Factors that put pressure on the pelvic floor — Being overweight or obese, having constant constipation and straining during bowel movements, and chronic coughing from smoking or health conditions can lead to disorders.

• Aging — Natural aging can weaken the pelvic floor for some women, but this doesn’t occur for all women, so the thought is it is simply a contributing factor.

• Radiation treatment — Radiation therapy for endometrial, cervical, or other types of cancer in the pelvic region can damage the pelvic floor muscles and tissues.

• Surgery — Hysterectomy and prior surgery to correct prolapse increase a person’s risk of developing pelvic floor disorders.

Treatments

At Women’s Health Medical Group we employ various treatments for pelvic floor disorders, both non-surgical and surgical.

Non-surgical methods include pelvic floor muscle training, commonly known as Kegel exercises; injections for bladder control issues; prescriptions to address bladder control and bowel control problems; and a vaginal pessary, a plastic device inserted by the woman to help support the pelvic organs.

Surgical treatments include procedures to repair the prolapse and rebuild pelvic floor support and procedures for bladder and bowel control.

If you have any symptoms of pelvic floor support, please don’t hesitate to call the team at Women’s Health Medical Group, 817-346-5336. We can help.