I was on a ski holiday with friends and at the end of the last day I did that thing you are not supposed to do. I took the ski lift up the mountain again and went downhill for that ‘last one’. I was tired, the slopes were icy, with bulky patches of snow around. And I fell. I fell and landed very badly on my bum. I had done this millions of times since starting snowboarding, but I felt that this time it was different. I knew it was bad.

To make a long story short I have since then always struggled with tailbone/coccyx pain. The first 6 months post-injury were almost unbearable, the first year horrible and then it got to a point where I could start live with it but it affected my life quite a lot. I struggled sitting down for too long, cinema was something to endure rather than enjoy and travelling in a car or an aeroplane was a mission, and I would never be particularly comfortable in a sofa or an armchair.

So when I got pregnant 10 years later this whole thing of giving birth concerned me a little. Could the coccyx injury affect the process? Could the pain get worse by a vaginal birth?

I saw my Women’s Health Physiotherapist a few weeks before the due date to discuss the issue, and she gave me exercises to carry out in preparation for the birth and we discussed birth positions. As I usually found it painful to lie flat on my back, I soon understood that this position was not going to be an option for me in any part of the labour process. I would need to give birth for example on all fours, standing up or any other way as long as I wouldn’t put pressure on the tailbone. That obviously didn’t happen. 

My prolonged labour and complex birth aggravated the tailbone pain to an unbelievable extent. When the effect of my epidural wore off I quickly realised that it was something that would affect mine – affect our life massively. I had experienced that coccyx pain a decade earlier so I just knew this wouldn’t be easy to recover from, and even worse was that this time the pain was on a totally different level.