Before she had children, Monique Hyde says she never really had issues with her body. She was healthy, active and did not think of herself as someone with chronic pain or ongoing medical problems.
It was pregnancy, and everything that came after it, that changed that. Like a lot of women, she says she was told many of the symptoms she experienced were simply part of having babies, part of recovery, part of the long list of things women are expected to put up with and push through.
She was 22 when she had her first child. The baby was large and Monique went into labour hoping to give birth naturally, but her daughter’s head was too big and the delivery ended in an emergency caesarean.
Two years later, at 24, she had her second baby, another large infant, and again her body was pushed hard.
By then, the toll on her abdomen was becoming impossible to ignore. She was left with significant diastasis recti, or abdominal separation, where the parallel muscles running down the middle of the stomach stretch and separate during pregnancy.
Some days, she says, her stomach looked normal. Other days, it looked as if she were pregnant all over again.
‘It wasn’t just cosmetic,’ Monique tells the Daily Mail. ‘My body didn’t feel like it was holding itself together.’
When her second child was still only months old, she had an abdominoplasty, also known as a tummy tuck. Part of that decision was cosmetic, she says, but it was also about the severity of the separation and trying to restore some strength and stability to her core. At that point, the hernias had not yet appeared. That would come later, and it would change everything.
Monique Hyde says her back pain was unlike anything she had felt before. Not a dull ache or something she could ignore. It was sharp, immediate and overpowering. When it struck, she would end up curled in a foetal position, focused only on getting through it without passing out
Within a week of giving birth to her third child, Monique says her pain escalated dramatically
Monique was 26 when she first felt it. She had separated from her ex-husband and was living in North Lakes, Queensland, with her daughters when a sudden, acute pain hit while she was cleaning the shower.
It stopped her where she stood. She remembers freezing, holding the area, trying to breathe through it, not understanding what had happened.
That was the beginning of the bilateral inguinal hernias that would go on to shape the next decade of her life.
She says the pain was unlike anything she had felt before. It wasn’t a dull ache or something she could ignore. It was sharp, hot, immediate and overpowering. When it struck, she would end up curled in a foetal position, focused only on getting through it without passing out.
She says she could physically feel the tissue settle back in once the episode passed.
‘It would dictate the way that I would do things,’ she says. ‘Cleaning, if I was bending over, I’d have to squat down because bending over that exertion alone could lead to me sitting in a foetal position in the corner in huge amounts of pain.’
She says the hernias affected how she worked, how she cleaned, how she played with her children and how she moved through ordinary life. Over time, she adapted in the way many women do. She avoided certain movements. She found workarounds. She learned how to brace herself. She worked out how to get through the day.
Doctors told her surgery was the only real solution. The likely treatment was mesh repair. But when she did try to get answers or more urgent help, she often felt dismissed.
Monique (centre) noticed changes she could not explain after trying a controversial peptide
Around this time, Monique says she noticed changes in her symptoms
She remembers being told to come back while the pain was happening, even though by its nature it was acute and unpredictable.
‘I just never did anything more about it because I was so underwhelmed when I did try to reach out,’ she says.
At 37, Monique made the decision to have another baby.
She went into that pregnancy expecting the worst. She stayed careful and disciplined, continuing to exercise and doing Pilates to support her body. By the end, she says, she was almost bedridden with lower back pain, but she kept going.
The hernias, surprisingly, did not cause major trouble during the pregnancy itself, although they ruled out a vaginal birth. Her third baby was delivered by caesarean.
Afterwards, Monique says she was told there were significant adhesions, especially around her bladder, and that the whole area was ‘a mess’. Tissue had to be torn apart to create enough room to deliver her son.
She says she was later told she could not have any more children.
Then, within about a week of giving birth, the pain escalated dramatically.
Monique described being in such severe pain that she struggled to walk and, at several points, considered going to emergency.
‘I can’t even take steps without being in so much pain that it’s bringing me to tears,’ she remembers telling her partner.
He wanted her to go back to hospital. She says she talked him out of it multiple times. He knew how high her pain tolerance was, and he knew this was different.
What made it even more stressful was the timing. Monique was meant to return to work two weeks after giving birth.
She is not just a mum. She is also a business owner, running Envy Aesthetics, the Redcliffe clinic she founded in 2019 after wanting to create a more personalised alternative to the colder, more transactional feel she saw elsewhere in the industry.
What happened next is the part of Monique’s story that she herself describes with uncertainty.
Her partner had been using a substance known as BPC‑157 for tennis elbow. Monique says they had been researching peptides through podcasts, online communities and anecdotal accounts, rather than through conventional medical advice.
She does not claim to have been well‑versed in the science.
‘I was willing to try anything,’ she says.
Around this time, Monique says she noticed changes in her symptoms.
‘Within 24 hours, I was walking more comfortably,’ she says. ‘Within three or four days even, no pain at all.’
She says that for the first time in years, she could move without fear of triggering an episode.
Several weeks later, she attended an ultrasound appointment that had been scheduled to assess her hernias following the pregnancy.
She says she was told there was no evidence of the hernias – but also no link was made to peptide use.
‘I was in a little bit of disbelief,’ she says. ‘With how much pain I’d been in for so many years.’
No doctor has linked these findings or symptom changes to peptide use, and Monique herself is careful not to frame her experience as proof.
Still, she believes there is room for more open conversations about emerging treatments, particularly when women feel like they are running out of options.
Mosh’s chief medical officer, Dr Kieran Dang, previously told the Mail he was worried about popular peptides spruiked for recovery, including BPC-157 and TB-500, noting that ‘most claims [about their benefits] come from small experiments on rats’.
‘More importantly, we don’t know if they’re safe, and there are real concerns they could stimulate cancer or abnormal cell growth,’ added Dr Dang.
That unknown risk, Dang said, is what worries doctors most.
Naturopath Gabbie Watt says peptides are, at their core, something the body already understands. But she warns: ‘Anyone claiming peptides will support postpartum recovery is extrapolating from animal studies and mechanism theory, not from evidence in that population’
But to properly understand where peptides fit into broader health discussions, it is important to step back from individual experiences.
Naturopath and qualified radiation therapist Gabbie Watt says peptides, at their core, are something the body already recognises.
‘Peptides are essentially messengers. They are short chains of amino acids – the same molecules that make up protein – but are shorter in size than protein,’ she says.
‘The shorter size means that they can bind to very specific receptors and trigger very targeted responses. Such as “make collagen” or “repair this ‘x’ tissue” inside the body.’
She explains that peptides are not new.
‘We already make thousands of them naturally. Most people would recognise insulin which is a peptide. So is oxytocin. Synthetic peptides are lab-made versions designed to mimic or amplify those natural signals.
‘The theory is that by delivering more of a specific signal, you can accelerate a process the body may do anyway, just faster, or more efficiently.’
But when it comes to postpartum recovery, she says the evidence is still limited.
‘There is currently no evidence or studies completed in postpartum recovery including caesarean wound healing, pelvic floor repair or hormonal support for BPC-157.
‘Most BPC-157 data comes from animal and lab studies. Only a handful of small, mostly uncontrolled human studies and one cancelled early trial are available so far.
‘Anyone claiming peptides will support postpartum recovery is extrapolating from animal studies and mechanism theory, not from evidence in that population.’
She says that gap is important.
‘The honest answer is that we don’t know the full risk profile, and that unknown is itself the risk. No long-term human safety data exists. No established dosing for humans. No quality control on products sourced online and if people source it from various places, they may not genuinely know what’s in the product.’
For women who have recently given birth, she says there are additional layers to consider.
‘We have a population that may be breastfeeding and we have zero data on whether peptides like BPC-157 transfer into breast milk or what effect that might have on a newborn.’
‘We have a person in significant hormonal transition, with an immune system actively recalibrating. In the case of caesarean births, where there are surgical wounds, the interaction between an angiogenic compound and wound healing is genuinely unpredictable.’
She adds that while some of the mechanisms behind BPC-157 are what make it appealing, they also raise questions that have not yet been answered.
‘The mechanism that makes BPC-157 theoretically interesting for healing is the promotion of angiogenesis (the growth of new blood vessels) is the same mechanism that raises a theoretical concern about cancer.
‘Angiogenesis is also how tumours establish their blood supply. In someone with an undiagnosed or dormant cancer, stimulating that pathway is potentially very dangerous. That risk is speculative, but it’s a speculative risk with no safety net.’
Those concerns reflect the position of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which issued a safety advisory on April 13 warning about the import, advertising and supply of unapproved peptides, including BPC‑157.
The TGA warns that such substances have not been evaluated for safety, quality or effectiveness.
That uncertainty, Watt says, is why treatments like this have not moved into mainstream care.
‘The short answer is that mainstream medicine requires a level of evidence that peptides like BPC-157 simply haven’t generated yet and in science, the absence of evidence is meaningful,’ she explains.
‘The legalities like the TGA guidelines exist to protect people, and particularly to protect vulnerable populations like postpartum women, from harms we haven’t yet been able to measure,’ says Watt.
Gabbie Watt is a naturopath with a background in both conventional and natural medicine. Before moving into naturopathy, she worked as a Radiation Therapist, an experience that shaped a clinical approach that is evidence-informed, practical and whole-person focused.
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