This past weekend, I went to a 40th birthday dance party of a friend. 

Her party started at 10 pm, and she danced til 4 am! (Stay tuned to find out how big of an accomplishment this is.) 

I made it til 11:45 pm and still felt shot the next day! 

This story gets better.

This friend and I reconnected after years of traveling our paths in life. 

This friend was part of my life in my 20s. We were connected through our husband’s hockey community and became fast friends during that era. She is a badass who successfully climbed the corporate ladder at a well-known tech company. I was truly always in awe of her. After she had her first kid, she left corporate America to live her dream of raising her kids.

Talk about a woman so clear in her values that she walked away and fully stepped into her new role. Of course, she killed it in motherhood—the mom of all moms. 

After her third child was born and she was homeschooling the other two, I wasn’t close to her, but I watched her on social media from afar. 

It’s kind of like the goal, Mom if you will. 

This past summer, she reached out to me, sharing that she had been in pain for 6 plus months and could no longer work out because she couldn’t tell what was making it better and what was making it worse. She was doing everything she could, from PT to dry needling. She consulted with orthopedic surgeons and found out she was going to need hip surgery. Her back had also started hurting.

After hearing about all she had been through and hearing her pain patterns, I was pretty confident that I knew what was going on straight away. However, I didn’t feel comfortable or confident referring her to anyone in her area. I wanted to give her hope, so I decided that she should travel to the clinic about 1.5 hours in traffic one way. (Yes, people fly here for bouts of treatment, but we all know how hard it is to organize childcare.) 

But she did it. She put herself first because she refused to accept this pain as her new normal, and she couldn’t accept that surgery was the answer. 

Upon evaluation, we discovered that her hip pain was actually coming from her pelvic floor, her obturator internus muscle to be exact. Causing her hip pain on the outside front of her hip. This constant dull, annoying ache.  

The orthopedic surgeon told her pelvic floor physical therapy wouldn’t help and that you would need surgery because of the amount of wear and tear already in the hip socket and labrum. (That’s one of the hardest recoveries to come back from and most definitely eventually leads to hip replacements, just for context.)

She wanted to dance and ski again and get back to her workouts. All of this was impacting her mental health. Without it, she felt negative, irritated, low energy, and constantly exhausted. 

Well, her healing took time.

The answer: healing the pelvic floor after an injury and three vaginal births. She never knew she had any issues with her pelvic floor. Her pain wasn’t even there.

Issues with her lower back and pelvis also had to be addressed.

That she could dance the night away at her 40th birthday party, felt like the biggest success! 

No pain, no aches, no surgery, no limitation. 

But just what if she didn’t figure out where this hip pain was coming from….. 

She would have gotten the hip surgery, and the issue that was causing the hip pain in the first place would not have been resolved. 

Meghan is still on her healing journey to change her patterns. Occasionally, she gets some residual SI (sacroiliac joint pain). This is always the part that takes the longest in any healing journey. But once that pattern has been established and we know what we’re working to change, the pain is much less and goes away with training the correct muscles and maintaining pelvic balance.

The moral of the story is to keep searching for natural solutions. Trust your intuition—it’s your body. If something doesn’t feel right, ask more questions and seek something that does. 

Let’s make surgeries the absolute last resort. They just lead to more surgeries. 

So, this email is to wish my inspiring friend Meghan a happy birthday! This is us at her big shindig! 

Love,

Dr. Allison