I write this, as I always do, carefully perched in a particular position on a particular chair that I know will mean that even if I sit here longer than 20 minutes, I won’t suffer too much pain when I stand up. I plan my every sit down and my every rising, you see, and have done for the last 15 years since the doctors delivering my first – and only – baby broke my coccyx doing so.
It’s very painful, a broken coccyx. And it takes a long time to heal – they tend not to fully – partly because, of course, there’s nowhere to put a splint. Also because if you do it while having a baby, you can’t really afford the bed rest that would help it on its way because keeping a newborn alive means quite a lot of unavoidable moving about. And sitting up, if you’re breastfeeding, which I was. And if you haven’t been told that your coccyx is broken, which I wasn’t, you think you’re just making a monumental fuss about an odd bit of pain that won’t go away, carrying on through the screaming agony as best you can.
You wish you could feed your son lying down on your side, but given that nobody really showed you how to breastfeed while you were in the hospital for six days (despite it being so hardline breast-is-best that the nurses refused to get you formula from the locked cupboard when you knew your baby wasn’t getting enough milk because your traumatised body wasn’t producing enough), there was certainly never any suggestion that this is a possible thing you could do to alleviate some of the nightmarish suffering.
