Well, ladies, I've had sort of a disappointing revelation. Just recently, everytime the baby sinks lower, I feel this electrical kind of nerve pain in my inner thigh right where my leg connects to my pelvic bone. I have this faint memory of that same pain in my last labor although I remember it radiating to the outside of my hip during labor. (It doesn't radiate...yet). And I remember wishing I could just disconnect my leg from my body. I'm pretty sure this is my psoas that is tighter than the average psoas. It's not something you can release or loosen within a few hours of days before labor. I'm starting to think that THIS was the source of my debilitating pain. I feel so discouraged that I might be on the wrong track (with the asynclitic/posterior). Then we lost our power in a storm and part of a huge tree fell on my car, crashing through windows and ruining the car seats for DD1 and the newborn. I feel overwhelmed and thought, well screw it, if I don't have the capacity or the clarity to make this a natural birth, I'll just forgive myself for getting an epidural. Then I read about how if it IS the psoas...epidural won't effect that pain. Now, where once I was confident that I could change my birth experience, now I feel scared (and pissed to be honest) that this is just going to really suck. I'll still get my weekly chiropractic adjustment and have the muscle therapist work on the psoas (though it's very tough to get to effectively when I can't lay on my back for more than 20 seconds without starting to black out).
The unreasonably tight psoas scenario can present similarly to the hip pain of the asynclitic/posterior scenario until these nerve-y type pains start presenting in the inner thigh. Position changes won't really do much...the baby just has to come out and there's no way to come out without effecting the psoas! *sigh*
I'll still try to include my "bag of tricks" for maternal positioning. It's mostly a "What to do if..." type of document. It's kind of long. I've penciled in some stuff that won't show up on the doc, but even without that, it's pretty comprehensive.
**Gah! Oops, I apparently "don't have permission" to include a document.
P.S. If anyone else is thinking this could be what their problem is, they say it's related to some trauma or abuse. 15 yrs ago, I started dealing with a series of health problems in my pelvic region (chronic UTI's, yeast infections, irritable bowel syndrome, then anxiety and fear + painful intercourse, more anxiety and fear...voila, super duper tight psoas. So I'm starting to understand how this all happened to me).
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