Belfie - re the being housebound with minimal pain versus getting out and about and paying for it afterwards, that essentially is THE dilemma with this. The killer for me was the 18 month recovery last time so I'm doing all I can to avoid that. I know if I minimise the pain during the pregnancy this time then I have a much better chance of recovering a lot sooner. So I've 'chosen' (not that it's much of a choice) the housebound route rather than being more active but being in a lot of pain.

The other thing is that this time around it struck really early for me and I really wasn't sure, even if I managed it well with minimal activity, belt, icing, pilates, how bad it would get so there was the fear of the unknown. I guess I reached a point a few weeks ago where I got really confident about my limits and confident that if I stuck within those limits that I could minimise the pain. I may have said this before in this thread, but last week I went to the physio and we high-fived each other. I basically said I'd beaten this bloody SPD because I'm in so little pain. Almost about to give birth, I'm in less pain now that I was 12 months POSTNATALLY last time. Don't get me wrong, I've had to make HUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE adjustments to my life to do that but as long as the recovery this time around is shorter, then I will be really pleased.

What I'm trying to say is that you will figure out for yourself what you can and can't do to keep the pain under control and you'll probably find that you'll feel much less frustrated once you have because you're dealing with the known rather than the unknown, if that makes sense. You'll kind of know, OK, if I walk this far then it will mean x amount of pain for x amount of time, sort of thing.