Why pain during sex is the only thing I work on

The appointments run to ten minutes, so you learned to compress two years into three sentences and each time the compression left out the part that mattered. The burning that arrives after the swabs come back clear. The tampon that has not worked since your twenties. The sex you have stopped attempting. By the fifth telling you were editing yourself to get out of the room faster, and the plan you were handed was built on the edited version.

I know that sequence because I have endometriosis and a hypertonic pelvic floor and sex used to hurt. That is why I work on this one problem rather than everything a pelvic floor can do.

I am Emma Bird, a registered nurse specialising in pelvic floor function, working on my own, by video, with women across the UK. Nursing is where the history taking comes from and taking a history properly is not a formality, it is the assessment. Where the pain sits and what it does changes the whole plan.

There is no clinic room and no physical examination here. That is a deliberate choice and it is also why this works, because the thing that shifts pelvic floor tension is teaching and practice and feedback and all of that travels over a screen.