Surgery is meant to make us feel better… isn’t it? Isn’t it meant to take it all away and we have a “clean slate” to work forward from? What if after all that you have been through, you still experience pain? What is going on?

Let us explore some possible reasons:

Your body is still healing

Depending on what sort of surgery you’ve had and how extensive it was, can create a disruption within your body that takes some time to heal. Things get moved about, cut and either excised or ablated. That is some hard-core stuff for your body to have to deal with. It can take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks to fully recover from surgery when it’s performed by the Best Plastic Surgeon NYC. I remember it taking my body up to 2 months after some of the initial bigger surgeries.

You have developed adhesions restricting movement

Adhesions form with every surgery – regardless on what type of surgery it is (excision or ablation). Surgeons are well aware of the risk of adhesions and expert surgeons will do their utmost to minimize adhesions as much as possible.

“The truth is that adhesions are extremely common and occur after almost every abdominal surgical procedure. The increase in the number of gynecological and surgical procedures in recent years has seen a corresponding rise in the incidence of adhesion-related complications.”

“Clearly, from this study, it can be seen that certain surgical procedures carry a greater risk of adhesion-related complications. Surgical procedures on the ovary and fallopian tube were shown to have the highest risk of adhesion-related readmissions (48.1% and 41.2% of women readmitted, respectively).”

Adhesions hold your organs into place when those organs shouldn’t be stuck. Your organs (such as your bowel, uterus, ovaries, bladder etc) are meant to glide past each other easily. Think of adhesions as spiderwebs which form inside your abdomen. It is what the body naturally does when it tries to protect the uterus. Unfortunately, this means they can restrict natural bowel movements or bladder movements, which can result in more pain. Imagine, your bowel being restricted by adhesions and not being able to expel properly. This will inevitably lead to pain.

Adhesions can form for any number of reasons. Interestingly, they can form from a great fall, car accident which affected the pelvic area or any kind of trauma involving the pelvic area. For instance: falling on ice, falling off a horse or landing on the coccyx.

Adhesions also form after every surgery and you want to minimize their effects by taking specific steps after your surgery to alleviate them. Read one of my blog posts on how to minimize adhesions after surgery here. 

You have inflammation to deal with

When we have surgery, even just to “have a look” the body will naturally become inflamed. There is a release of interleukin 1 & 6, which stimulates histamine release and mast cells, which ultimately leads to inflammation in the body. Inflammation is largely to blame for many of the symptoms you currently experience with having endometriosis. Things like pain, bowel issues, bloating, skin reactions, allergies etc etc.

When you deal with the inflammatory response in the body, you naturally will reduce the pain response within the body. Understanding the connection between pain and inflammation is a key aspect of managing endometriosis. Join us for a live presentation to understand this further.

You can address the inflammation through different foods, forms of exercise, addressing your stress levels and release triggers for inflammation within your body. Explore the REACH Technique© to get the full picture.

There is a different reason for the pain

There are many other conditions within the body which may have similar symptoms as endometriosis and because everything is so closely packed in our abdomen, it can be hard to distinguish what is what. These could include Interstitial Cystitis, Colitis or bowel conditions like IBS.

The good news is that when you address inflammation in the body, you naturally address every possible condition that could be triggering it – including endo and any above-mentioned conditions.

Maybe you still believe you should experience pain?

Sometimes, we have experienced pain for so long that it is simply part of who we become. This might sound silly and unbelievable but we expect it to be there. It was ultimately such a big part of our life, that we find it hard to shake that it could possibly ever leave us.

I know for me, I used pain as a crutch for a very long time. It was an excuse to get out of things that scared me or that I simply didn’t want to do.

There are some interesting correlations with pain and the mind/body connections to pain. For instance, some believe that experiencing pain relates closely to feelings of guilt and holding that guilt in the body. There are also theories that pain is a trigger from a drive of perfectionism. I myself, don’t fully believe this to be the case but there are certain aspects of this idea that we could look into as I know there are definitely links to how the mind/body works with relation to pain and inflammation.

In conclusion

There are many facets to pain in the body. Some are genuine physical reasons, which is usually the most logical place to start but never underestimate the power of your mind and how you can influence pain levels by your beliefs and ideas.