But I Don’t Have Time to Recover!
January 17, 2006 by kate baggott
Filed under Infancy
From the moment I gave birth, my to-do list has been full. Here are the tasks that had to do for the first two weeks after the birth just to recover from delivery.
- Drink 2 cups of Ruckbildungs tee. Each 30 gram package of this German “recovery tea” contains a mixture of 3 herbs: 10g of Melissa leaves, 15 g Alpine Lady’s-Mantle, and 5 g of Shepherd’s Purse. You steep one teaspoon of the mixture in one cup of water for 10 minutes.
- Take two 15 minute sitzbads with Epsom salts infused with essential oils to treat all my sores “down there.” The point of a sitz bad or “sitting bath” is to treat the perinium and hemerroids with a good soak while ensuring that water doesn’t enter the vagina.
- At least twice a day, do kegels for five minutes while lying on my stomach.
Altogether these tasks would have taken an hour of my waking life broken up into lots of little time chunks. Still, I couldn’t do it. Luckily, it wasn’t an all or nothing list of tasks. Usually, I managed one sitzbad and one cup of tea and still got to feel better. The tea helped with constipation and the sitzbads helped sooth everything I couldn’t sit on.
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