Gayle has been hiding away her protruding tummy for 3 years and has come to Dr Pixie to get help with the problem. Dr Pixie tells Gayle that after her last pregnancy, the muscles in her abdomen have been damaged meaning that they are not holding everything in as they should be.
This can be corrected with surgery and after stitching together the gap between her abdominal muscles the bulge has all but gone. But Gayle will need to regularly perform special exercises to ensure that her tummy goes back to how it was pre-pregnancy.
After having a baby your stomach muscles should get back to normal in a few weeks. For a few new mothers the muscles have trouble healing, and this is known as a muscle divarication. It happens when the muscles have split to give the baby space to grow, and after birth the two sides don’t heal back together again.
Physiotherapy can be used to help the muscles heal. If this doesn’t work then surgery will be required to stitch the muscles back together again. Though most commonly found in recently pregnant women, divarication may be found in anyone who may have suffered muscle damage from trauma, surgery or obesity.
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