Case Study: Sacrum Injury from a Snowboard Fall

Living in Colorado gives me lots of opportunities to help people who have experienced a sacrum injury after falling on the snow or ice or while skiing or snowboarding. The case study I share today is about addressing the physical and mental components from my client’s sacrum injury. While the primary reason for this client coming in to see me was not childbirth related, you will see how you can apply the work you learn at the Institute for Birth Healing in any of your sessions.

Client History

In today’s case study, I share about a client who came after experiencing a sacrum injury from a fall two weeks prior to her session with me. She fell while standing still at the bottom of the mountain after a beautiful run snowboarding. Since her fall, she had been having pain with sitting, transitional movements, getting in/out of her car, rolling over in bed and moving side to side with her legs. Her X-rays were normal, and she had been getting acupuncture and craniosacral therapy.

One of the main questions I wanted to ask this client was about the direction of force from the fall. Did she land on her side or straight back down on her butt? Did she feel she landed on her tailbone or not? Getting clarity on the forces of energy imparted into the pelvis helped me determine how to approach the pelvis. I kept the client’s description of what happened to cause the sacrum injury in mind, but set it aside and tuned into the bones of the pelvis to see what else was going on in the body as the bones always tell the full story.

Assessment and Treatment of the Sacrum Injury

When I slipped my hand under the client’s sacrum in supine, I didn’t feel any superior energy drawing her sacrum up to her head. The sacrum itself was pretty still, meaning it energetically wasn’t pulling in any direction except the lower third of the bone was lighting up in my hand. It felt like that was where the impact occurred. Tuning into that area more made me realize that working on the bone in supine wasn’t going to get me the releases the bone needed, so I had her roll over into prone.

Palpating the sacrum in prone revealed compressed forces happening in the sacrum from top down and bottom up. S2-3 was compressing down into S4-5 which was compressing up. This made sense to me as the ground forces from the lower sacrum compressed the bone superiorly while the weight of her body brought the top of the sacrum forces inferiorly and they met together in the middle.

I first worked on the bone centrally and then felt the right side was more compressed than the left, but each side needed its own unwinding. After the unwinding on each side, the client felt a noticeable difference in the tension in her lower back and pelvis. I also checked all the sacral mobility tests that I teach in both the Holistic Treatment of the Pregnant Body and the Holistic Treatment of the Postpartum Body courses to address the sacrum injury. The right side needed a bit more help with mobility in all directions.

Advanced Treatment of the Sacrum Injury

Knowing the impact a fall can have on the whole body system, after releasing the sacrum I pulled in techniques that I teach in the Advanced Postpartum Techniques course. I went directly to the dural tube and released the right-sided restrictions I found there.

During our session, this client had shared that she was snowboarding with a friend and had just gotten down to the ski base. She was thinking about how she was having so much fun snowboarding and taking a break from being a mom for the day. It was right after she had this thought that she fell on her sacrum while standing still. When I heard this, my intuition told me this was a really important piece for my client.

I pulled in the work I teach in the Birth Healing Intensive and began asking her more about this idea of having fun while being away from her kids, and she revealed that her parents worked really hard and parented her and her siblings with zero joy and fun. I asked her what beliefs she had about parenting from this experience. We discovered that she believed parenting had to be serious and couldn’t be fun. She shared that her partner’s family had a ton of joy and fun in their family, and she was having difficulty reconciling these two different beliefs.

Wrapping Up Her Session

We then went on to explore her body from her births and found a bilateral splay of the ischiums and a sacral flexion pattern in her pelvis. She had a lot of scar tissue in the top half of her external anal sphincter from tearing that had occurred during her births.

Even with the releases, her pelvic floor muscles still weren’t responding well. I didn’t appreciate any prolapse until I assessed her in standing. When I realized she had a stage 2 bladder prolapse, I could feel the tension down the lateral sides of her vaginal wall and I knew it was from all the scar tissue. I laid her back down and released the endopelvic fascia bilaterally, and when she stood back up again, the bladder was no longer prolapsing, and her pelvic floor muscles were much stronger. She felt an immediate improvement in her core activation and was surprised at how different everything felt internally.

While excited about the improved strength and pain relief from her sacrum injury, she was most thrilled with shifting her limiting belief and seeing how that was going to help her bring more joy into her parenting. Maybe this is why she fell and created this experience for her to heal.

About the Author: Lynn Schulte is a Pelvic Health Therapist and the founder of the Institute for Birth Healing, a pelvic health continuing education organization that specializes in prenatal and postpartum care. For more information, go to https://instituteforbirthhealing.com