By: Rhonda McLachlan Registered Massage Therapist
For the past 12 years, I have specialized in prenatal, postnatal and infant massage. However, after going through the process first hand with the pregnancy of my son, I can now say I am an expert! Experiencing the symptoms such as waking up from a dead sleep with excruciating calf cramps, constant low back pain, sharp sciatica pain into my butt, pounding head aches, round-ligament pain and over all discomfort…massage was my hero!
Don’t get me wrong; I loved watching my belly grow and feeling this little baby dance inside me. What I didn’t like was waking up repeatedly throughout the night from muscle aches and pains. So off to see my RMT I went! My RMT massaged away the low back pain, loosened up my pelvis, brought my shoulders back away from my ears and helped me sleep soundly!
Even after my delivery, the need for massage didn’t go away. Now it was time for my body to adjust back to normal, all while caring for a newborn and recovering from delivery. Stress, fatigue, and shoulder/neck pain quickly became my new norm. Breastfeeding, pumping, and carrying my little boy put a new strain on my body, and within one month I had developed bursitis and tendonitis in my dominant shoulder. What was I going to do?! I couldn’t pick up my baby without pain now! Without massage and doing diligent rehab, my shoulder would have progressed to frozen shoulder or worse.
Through all these years I had treated hundreds of pregnant women, and now felt like I had truly walked a pregnant mile in their shoes! Will this change the way I treat? Yes, because I now know what helped me the most, what techniques I preferred, what positions were most comfortable for me, and what got the best results for my pain!
I have even been using my infant massage techniques on my son. When he is bloated, crampy and gassy from not making a bowel movement for days, I massage his little tummy, do reflexology on his hands and feet and get him feeling back to normal.
I am so excited to come back to work and share my new-found expertise with my pregnant mommas, to help them feel better, get a better sleep, and teach them how to take care of their bodies before and after delivery. Pregnancy can be incredibly uncomfortable but I am here to make it simply incredible.