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Year Of Firsts: Your Experiences
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 3 days ago | Replies (15)Comment receiving replies
Interesting topic. I had NS RARP in late June 2024. Let me take a little literary license on your question. Rather than "firsts", for me there was 2 significant "periods" when I felt like I "turned a major corner". The first was about 3 months. I had been continent immediately after the catheter came out, but I didn't feel confident as I always felt a bit in danger of minor leakage whenever something new happens (like the first time I lifted something heavy and leaked a little). Sometime around 3 to 4 months I went through a transition period and went from unconfident to confident. At this point (7 months) while I acknowledge some things are different, I consider myself fully recovered urination wise and no longer give it much thought. Similarly, my ED recovery has been gradual with a fair amount of angst. Just in the last 2 weeks I've transitioned into a much more peaceful and confident state. I still have a long way to go, but I'm much more confident having sex with my wife and my much more confident that things will continue to improve. Both these transitions were big deals for me. Best wishes on your recovery. BTW, here's a great video on the sexual recovery by a doctor at Sloan Memorial CCOE that I ran across recently that I wish I'd seen earlier:
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I'm going to be perfectly honest, watching this video drove me off a cliff then yanked me back up it and drove me off again. While the information is good and to the point, the statistics he laid out seriously messed with my head.
Up until this point, based on my own reading of numerous papers, I figured ED was something I was less concerned with than incontinence. After months of preparation I believe incontinence will be controllable and now ED is on my mind. This video almost goes to great lengths to say "well, you are screwed no matter what". I'm < 60, so I'm in that preferred group but it's a tiny percentage that function without meds, tinier still are those that function naturally after surgery and then there's that bullet of "well if you are lucky enough to get an erection after the catheter is out then it'll go away and you'll build up for 2 years". All of that and it's already heavily presumed by my doctor, based on the MRI, that half my nerves will be lost.
I had a total meltdown after watching this and even considered canceling my surgery (just 4 days away) and figured that I'd rather have quality of life over no quality and instead quantity of life. It's not just me, my wife also suffers this agony.
This is a good and informative video, but it hit me hard enough that I've not been able to eat all day and am hanging on by a thread. Reality is brutal, but Jesus, that's too much reality for me to deal with. I've been hanging on by a thread already.
I'm hopeful, but not nearly as much as before this video. I went from 25% hope that I would be "one of those guys" to 1%.