My Journal

[maxxxxx]

I had a complex surgery, penis enlargement with graft. Returned at work 15 days after. im from Europe.

[Fran4524]

I had a complex surgery, penis enlargement and graft. Returned at work 15 days after. im from Europe.

What is your country? if I can ask you it

[Tortão]

But to summarize, my best advice for a good looking implanted dick:
Pick a good surgeon.
Make sure you deflate fully as soon as possible. Of course, as soon as your doc lets you, but once you get the green light, deflate fully.
Keep your dick pointed up as often as you can in the beginning.
Never force it down. When it is ready to hang down, it will tell you. Don't force it down.

Merrix,
Thank you so much for your detailed answer! I really appreciate your efforts to help other men here! Thank you!
Solid advice, I'll stick to them.

[merrix]

I haven’t been posting anything here for quite some time, but thought I’d at least keep up my yearly update. For years I kept my account active, did what I could to share my experience, and for whatever it was worth, the knowledge I gained by of course having and using an implant, but also by doing tonnes of research on the subject.
At some stage earlier this year, I realized I hadn’t posted anything for a long time. I logged in a few times and saw the same old questions on top of the list. Questions I have discussed, read and even answered a hundred times. So I stayed away.
Of course the fact that same questions will pop up again and again is nothing strange. On the contrary. All guys thinking of getting, or having gotten, an implant will have the same pool of questions. Because it is those same questions that matter to all people.

In this status update I hope I will give my two cents on many of those questions, but also on a couple of topics which are not that frequently debated. The post will be way too long to post as one, so I will divide it on as many posts as it takes.

Here goes.

Background recall
I was probably always having ED to some degree. At least since the day I wanted to use my dick for sex. I did have sex, but not as I wanted to. I knew at a very young age something wasn’t right. I got hard, but didn’t really stay hard. I didn’t have much morning wood. Even when masturbating, my erections were poor, or rather they faded quickly if I just took a short little break.
Turned out later I had a venous leak. So to all guys out there wondering what’s wrong. If you get hard, but struggle to stay hard, VL is a hot candidate. Which sucks, because Viagra and its cousins won’t work as well for you as for those suffering from poor inflow.

Fast forward to the time before implant
I was around 40. Living my dream. Big fat expatriate contract in one of the best places on earth to live in. One of the metropolises in SE Asia. Travelling the world for business, staying at great hotels, always in business class and in the suites – gold cards on three airlines and two hotel chains. Great physical shape, beautiful wife (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=680), great friends, driving Porsche and BMW, vacations in tropical paradises 5-6 times per year. Thanks again to those gold card points…
But. There was a big F-ing but. My sex life wasn’t nowhere near the standard of the rest of my life. Without pills, forget it. It basically didn’t work. Couldn’t even penetrate most of the time. So I always used pills. In heavy doses. Normally 100 mg Viagra + 10 mg Cialis, sometimes more. That made sex possible, but still poor. Getting harder and harder to remember as the years pass by, but I’d say I had penetrative sex 9 times of 10. Of he 9, I would need “help” to get it up around half of them. Help as in a blowjob and then my wife had to get down on her back faster than the speed of light to let me penetrate before It went soft again.
Sex was always a battle against the clock. Not too long foreplay, because then it’ll run out of gas. Not thrusting too slow, then the lack of action will kill the erection. Changing positions was always a gamble. Her on top was always the highest risk.
The only way for me to feel reasonably okay after sex was to be hard, fast and egoistic. Give her a short foreplay, have her suck my dick, penetrate her, one position, hard and fast from beginning to end, come inside her, roll over. At least my dick worked. Better being an egoistic lover than an impotent non-lover.
My wife of course adjusted herself to the sex life we had. She learned to prefer that sex as well. Simply because it was the only reliable alternative, and it was the only alternative that produced reasonably good chances of avoiding my dick going down, and consequently, my mood going down. She didn’t want to see me suffer and feel bad, so she encouraged the fast, hard sex just as much as I did. And of course you don’t need a therapist license to understand that for us, sex was more about not failing than about pleasure. The only goal was to keep my crap dick hard till I could come. Anything beyond that was a bonus. I would say my wife orgasmed maybe 3, 4 times out of 10. Mostly from me giving her oral before fucking her, but occasionally while being inside her. I thought that was quite ok. If I can make her come 30% of the time, that’s not too bad. Jesus.

We met quite young. We were both working a few years before university, and we met in university at around the age of 25.
We had both had other partners of course. My casual sexual encounters were all following the same pattern. Fast, hard, egoistic, macho style. Better than the embarrassment of having my dick go down. And I got away with it more or less every time. But at that age, my ED wasn’t as bad as when I came to 40.
My wife had a handful of lovers before me. Not sure how many, I probably used to know at some stage, but can’t remember now. I would say my memory tells me she said four, which probably means it was rather six, seven or eight. As this was from her late teens through her early twenties, of course her lovers were young.
Having had my ED shit forever, even though I understood my dick was crap, I didn’t fully know how crap it was. What was normal?
Pulling your underwear off for sex and having a super hardon from then on and as long as needed?
Needing a BJ now and then to get it up?
Occasionally failing to get it up?
I wanted to know, and asked her a few times over the years, but she always refused to answer that question. Which I respected. She just said she didn’t want to talk about her sexual history with other men with me. That she didn’t want to compare. That all relationships, even at the sexual level, has its pros and cons. That she was happy with what we had.

What saved me from going bananas over this over all the years was probably my success in life in all other areas. And I think partly that I had always had these issues. Would probably have been worse to have had a working dick, and then losing it.
But somehow, my ED never really floored me. It bothered me, but it didn’t destroy my life.
For some reason, I suddenly started to be more bothered by it though. I was starting to research (again) treatments. I found the Sclerotherapy, well written about in this forum. I went to Austria, got my Sclerotherapy surgery by Dr. Kuehas and his partner. And realized what I was missing. Woke up at night by erections so hard they hurt. Morning erections. Spontaneous erections. To the point where it was almost becoming a problem. Had to wait 3 (?) weeks before sex, and already by the end of those three weeks I felt that the effect started to wane. But nevertheless, those first few times we had sex after I was healed – shit. I had never been that hard in my life, and it felt great.
Somewhere around that time, I wanted to know what that meant on the scale of “normal”. Was my new dick softer, equal to, or even harder than what my wife’s experience from her early-twenties-sexual-encounters?
The answer was that it was perfect this way. This is totally normal, or even better. But definitely normal at least. OK. Was that good or bad news? Depending on how you look at it. Good perhaps if it the effect stays, but bad in the sense that my previous dick was absolute rubbish.
After a month or two, the hit and miss was back. So much for the sclerotherapy.
But now I had tasted the wine. Fucking (or not fucking) with a limp dick was all of a sudden even worse than in the pre-sclerotherapy era. I started to get more and more bothered by my ED. Every failure drew a heavier negative response than before. And my wife suffered as well, of course from the poor sex, but more from seeing me suffer.
And I hated that feeling. Starting to fuck her, and then having to pull out because my dick went soft. Seeing her sucking it like a maniac to get it up again, but fail. I felt like a miserable, pathetic piece of useless shit. And I couldn’t help thinking about how she must feel. Did she miss being properly fucked? Did she fantasise about her previous lovers? All those thoughts started to pop up in my head. Not for the first time, but for the first time did they linger. They didn’t want to go away.

I had found the information about Sclerotherapy on a site called Frank Talk. At that site, there was a forum about penile implants as well. Sounded really weird, but I started to read about them. And I read a lot. The posts that made the largest impact on me was by a guy called Pockie. His story sounded similar enough to mine, and he was one of the few users I could identify with . Most others were multi-disease, older, weird men. At least that’s what I remember I thought. There were men with all sorts of physical and mental illness, being on a dozen of medications, having done a dozen of surgeries, and almost being a dozen decades old as well.
And even though the implant seemed to be a possible solution, I just couldn’t really get my head around whether this was for me. Or was this for 80 year olds with 80 year old wives, men who had a dick as dead as a bag of beans. Those who tried and failed the vacuum pumps, the injections and whatever. Was an implant something that turned you into a weird freak with an artificial dick between your legs. A fake dick. A dildo operated into your dick, with a huge disgusting pump bulb in your scrotum. You take a shower in the gym and people will wonder what the fuck is wrong with you. Your wife will look at you in disgust, you miserable impotent loser with your cheesy plastic dick.
But what about Pockie..? He sounded super satisfied, and he seemed normal..?

I looked at youtube videos, I read and I read and I read. Trying to get my head around the question with a big Q. Was this for me? Or would the implant just make things worse? Just turn me into a freak instead of a loser?

I also aired the implant idea with my wife. She was very careful with giving away her true feelings about it. Focusing on that she didn’t want me to go through such a difficult, serious and risky surgery. What we had was ok. It is not worth the risk. I later understood that she didn’t even properly understand the concept. I even think she said once later that at the beginning she thought the pump bulb was external (!).
I sorted that out by showing her some vidoes of implants on youtube. And she got positively surprised. “It looks normal!”.

At this stage, during one of our discussions on whether I should do it or not, I asked her again. How bad is it? I just want to know. That is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle to me. How bad is my ED? What is my sexual performance compared to normal men? Only you can help me understand that. How often did it happen that someone you had sex with failed, that he didn’t get hard or that he turned soft during the act?

Same old answer, don’t want to compare you with others, bla, bla and bla.
But I insisted.
And she answered. With a sledgehammer blow that hit me in the forehead with full power. Bang. Never. It never happened. All of them were hard when it was time and they stayed hard till it was over. Everyone. Every time.

That was it for me. The decision was taken. Implant it is.

To be continued.

[traveler]

merrix, thanks for posting your 6-year update. Everyone's journey is unique that brings us all to the same destination.....ED. Your post is near and dear to my heart as I contemplate my implant that is scheduled with Dr Eid for November 12, 2021. My frame of mind currently is somewhere between scared shitless and euphoria.

Unlike your background of many years of reduced function and at a much younger age my ED story hit all at once, fast and furious. I am 65 now. At age 62 in 2018 my annual physical exam showed a sudden increase in my PSA. The previous year was .08 and had spiked to 9.7. Obviously something was going on. Further testing and a biopsy revealed cancer in my prostate with a gleason score of 7(4+3). Fortunately detected early and no cancer showing in my bones or organs or outside the "capsule", (prostate). I was convinced the doctor was looking at the wrong chart. I was the healthy guy, healthy diet, exercise, yearly physical, vitamins and supplements, avoided processed foods, etc., no health issues or symptoms whatsoever. I felt great. Everything was good in the erection department. My choices were surgery or radiation. After researching chose surgery, get the shit out of me and move on. I chose the most qualified surgeon I could find and had the robotic nerve sparring procedure done OCT/2018. After the surgery there were some "signs of life" in the erection department and was anticipating a recovery of some sort. At my 90-day post surgery exam my PSA was still at 8.7. While still no cancer in bones/organs there was evidence of "microscopic" cancer cells in my prostate bed. So I received 8 weeks of daily radiation APR-JUN/2019. This took care of the cancer but as we know "fries" everything typically leaving virtually no function of erections. I also went through 1 year of ADT, (Lupron injections and Zytiga), that was the worst of it all. I found out that life without testosterone was absolutely horrible, totally out of whack and in a mental fog for a whole year. I went from full speed ahead to nothing in less than a year. The good news is since that time my PSA has been undetectable. I am very thankful for that outcome and glad to be here typing this response to your post. If my cancer had not been detected early my outcome would/could have been a very different path. I'm grateful to be here enjoying time with my wife, our 3 grown children, their spouses, AND 11 grandchildren. Life is good.

I married my high school sweetheart at the age of 19 and in just a few weeks we will celebrate 46 years together. I have never been with another woman so I have no one to compare her to and I am thankful for that. I can't imagine being with any other woman on the planet. She has supported me through this entire process. In light of this sudden change of me not being able to supply her physical needs she continues to stand by my side and battle this challenge together. I am blessed.

After my radiation treatments discussions began with my urologist regarding ED treatment options, she (yes, SHE, Dr Lannis Hall, a super smart and caring medical professional, I fired 2 urologists prior to finding her), told me to keep all options on the table, including an implant. I left the office that day thinking there was no way in hell I was ever going to have an inflatable device placed inside my body. I went down the typical and common path of meds, (virtually ineffective), VED, I skipped the injections, did not want to deal with those or the possible side effects and long term use issues. We have used the VED with some success but it is so cumbersome and awkward to use. That led us to finally thinking seriously about the implant as an option. Thanks to this website and the mass of valuable real life experiences, advice and knowledge I am headed for my implant on November 12, 2021 with Dr Eid.

I was fortunate enough to start a small business and cash out in 2007 at the age of 52. I have dabbled in a few small deals since then but fortunate that this has allowed me a very comfortable lifestyle and have been able to enjoy a number of years of not having to work with my wife and family, again I am blessed. As I get ready for this next chapter in my journey to ride off into the sunset into my golden years the only missing is the intimacy with my wonderful wife. Dr Eid is going to help us with that on 11/12/2021.

This post got way more wordy than anticipated. Really just wanted to say thanks for your post and I am looking forward to posting my 6-year post surgery report in the future. Thanks again.

[RoninRiff]

Thank you, Merrix, for providing these updates on your experience with your IPP journey. Your posts have been so informative for me and, I know, countless others suffering from ED. Reports on life with the IPP years after initial surgery is rare on this site but so valuable to those of us considering taking the plunge. We read a lot from implantees during the early stages after implantation but not enough about how life is like years later. As you have gotten back on with your life, it would be easy to forget about franktalk and that would be understandable. Thank you so much, though, for checking back in periodically and providing these updates that are so valuable to others.

[defiant]

Please do continue!!

[Echegollen]

Always a pleasure to read you Merrix. This is by far the most informative thread of this forum.

Glad to know you'll keep giving updates at least once a year.

[merrix]

6 years update - Part two

Getting the implant

Once the decision was made, I got started (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010#p36538). Continued to research my ass off, but now more with focus on where, when to do it. And most importantly, who should cut my dick up? Frank Talk helped a lot to create my short list. This was 6 years ago, and the names that popped up as what I judged as the top guys were Eid, Perito and Kramer. I was considering a fourth doc based in Houston (which I can’t even remember the name of today), but he was never really in the race. I contacted all the three first mentioned through their web page contact sheet. Eid responded first, within a few days. I communicated with him and scheduled a video call. Around that time, I got a reply from Perito, but thought I’d have the video call with Eid first. Still no word from Kramer. I had the video call with Eid, and I remember clearly that my main question to get answered was the one I mentioned in part one of this update – Is this for me? Is an implant something for a guy like me, at my age, with my degree of ED? Or was the implant for 120 year old semi-retarded freaks with blind, dement wives? I also wanted to know what it felt like. Will it feel reasonably normal? Will sex feel close enough to the real thing, or will it feel artificial? Of course, I also wanted to know the risk and consequences of infection. But that was about it. I wasn’t overly concerned with size impact. I always figured that it didn’t really matter. If the implant would fix my ED without turning me into a pathetic freak – then if the price was my dick lost half an inch of length – I’d pay it. All I wanted was to have a working dick, to be able to have sex without failure.

I remember these questions were the most difficult for me to find the answer to. Reading at FT, there was almost only sunshine stories. The mantra of the site was “My results could not have been any better”. Everybody had picked the best doc, the best implant, had the best pump placement and the hardest dick. But when reading the details, some lost 2 cm length, the pump was on the shaft of the penis, they struggled to ejaculate and so on. What could I expect? What was a reasonable expectation?

Also worth pointing out – unless FT is (was) full of idiots spending their days fooling themselves and the FT community – most people do actually get happy with the implant. Even the ones that lose length, have a high pump, struggle to orgasm or whatever, are still happy. They still claim “I couldn’t have gotten any better results” and “My doc was fantastic” and so on. This is worth thinking about. The details most likely look more important before the surgery. Once time has passed, “small” issues fade and the remaining effect is that you can fuck. You can pump your dick up and you can fuck anyone, anytime, anywhere for as long as you want. Period. That’s an amazing thing when you have suffered from not being able to. If your pump is in front of or behind your balls, if your dick is 5.5 or 6.5 inches – well that sort of fades in comparison as time goes by. I remember all those failures. All the missed or passed opportunities. Not anymore. When I want to, I can. 100% guarantee.
I know however that nobody will think like this before they get the implant. Then all those issues mean everything and inevitably create doubts and fear.

The video call with Eid turned into a phone call due to the shitty internet connection at the hotel I was staying for a business trip. But he made me feel comfortable.
I remember I told him about my situation, again trying to understand whether this was for me, after all – I could have sex, or if this was only for older men who for whatever reason (e.g. cancer) could not get it up at all. Eid just said that I was a great candidate for an implant, and that he had implanted several young men with great results. He said a man my age should easily be able to have sex for thirty minutes, and that my (poor) sexual performance was definitely qualifying me as a candidate.
I was still on. I still hadn’t heard anything from Kramer’s office, and I was going to go with Eid. Him being in New York was a plus as well for me, since getting there from my part of the world is easier than Baltimore or Florida. New York has just more flight options. Plus, I rather spend a week in New York than Baltimore…

I booked the surgery and from even starting to think about implants till the scheduled day of surgery was only a few months. But that’s me. I like to analyse stuff, think carefully and intensely. But then – bang. I make my decision and I move on. And so I did.

More on choosing the doc

This has been heavily debated here, and I have been one of the heavier debaters. I have always said that picking the right doc is the number one decision to get right if you want to maximize your chances of a great result. The “go local” or “pick the best” debate is, I suppose, going to go on forever on FT. I don’t really give a shit what you do. It’s your life, your dick, your money. I however only had one thing in mind. Find the best F doctor around. Give myself the absolutely best chances of success – or rather the absolute minimum risk of failure. I would not let travel distance or money stop me. I literally had to travel to the other side of the planet to do my surgery with Eid in New York. And I paid a business class ticket and the surgery myself with not a cent coming from insurance. Now I am fully aware of the fact that a lot of people don’t have the financial situation I had, and simply do not have that choice. Some people are also unable to travel for whatever reason. As I said, I don’t give a shit which doc you pick (or picked). All I am saying is that there are studies clearly pointing to a strong correlation between results (patient satisfaction, infection rates) and surgeon’s experience. That should be weighed into the decision.

Here are infection data from a study, which I unfortunately don’t have the link to, but I would guess the link is somewhere earlier in this thread.

Implants/year: 0-2
Quartile: 1
Infection Rate: 3.125%

Implants/year: 3-7
Quartile: 2
Infection Rate: 3.0%

Implants/year: 8-31
Quartile: 3
Infection Rate: 2.63%

Implants/year: 32+
Quartile: 4
Infection Rate: 1.25%

Eid, Kramer
Implants/year: ~300
Infection Rate: 0.6%

Differences might seem small, but are not. E.g. going with a surgeon doing 5 implants per year vs the top famous surgeons will mean you have a 5 times (400%) larger risk of infection.
Doing one surgery plus two revisions will mean Eid, Kramer etc will give you 1-0.994^3=1.8% risk of catching an infection. The 5 implants per year doc will leave you with 1-0.97^3=8.7% risk of infection. 8.7% seems like a risk too high to take if you can avoid it.

The Surgery

Cost: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=20#p36731
Pre op exam: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=20#p36765
Surgery: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=30#p36810
All documented in the early pages of this thread. But Eid was truly great. As described, he even came to my hotel room twice (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=30#p36818 and viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=60#p36959). What stood out with him was simply his knowledge and competence. He had a very confident but still not cocky way. He just explained how it works, what will happen, and so on. And he was always right in everything he said.
Worth mentioning here is probably his measurement before surgery. He just injected my dick, pulled out a ruler, stretched my dick, measured it and said: 16 cm is what you have and 16 cm is what you will get. Measured girth and said that’s what I will get as well. I said that I was normally a little bit longer with a proper Viagra erection, but he just ignored that. We both see that the ruler says 16 cm today, and that’s what you will be after all is done. Period. Hard to argue with and great transparency and accountability. I remember asking what the chances (risk) was that I’d be shorter, and he basically said none. I will be 16 cm long and 14 cm girth. End of story. As you may have read in earlier posts or my signature, I actually am quite a bit longer than that today, but I will come back to that.

Recovery was a bit of a pain in the ass. Longer time than for an absolute majority of his patients. My second night was as bad as they come (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=30#p36818). But according to him because of a few reasons.
• The sclerotherapy. Reducing draining function in my dick.
• Need for extensive diluting of my cavernosum because of plenty of scar tissue. He thought my curvature was a mild PD.
• The more than usual invasive surgery. He installed a 22 cm implant, found that there was room for more. Took it out, added RTEs, put it back in again. Still room for more. Threw the 22 cm in the bin, put in a 24 cm and was happy. So basically three installations in one surgery.
• The fish oil. I took quite large doses up till surgery. Didn’t get (or didn’t take in) the info that this is blood thinning.

I stayed three weeks at that Manhattan hotel, and that wasn’t fun. But who the F cares now?
And that’s worth pointing out. Don’t put so much focus on those temporary issues. Travelling to the surgery. Post op pain. Embarrassing “flaccid” the first few weeks. This is for the long run. Your target is great results and great sex, not minimum pain and minimum embarrassment during the recovery period.
But difficult it was. My dick pointed up at 1-2 o’clock for the first week. Even though Eid leaves it more or less totally deflated. He does that, or did back then at least – I don’t know if he has changed his approach – to avoid scar tissue forming around an empty reservoir. This can cause the dreaded autofill problem later on, and of course, equally or more importantly it can reduce the effective capacity of the reservoir and thereby make it impossible to completely deflate. This is worth keeping in mind when you read people here saying they can deflate properly. Perhaps their doc screwed up and caused this to happen. Or perhaps they screwed up themselves. Inflating too early and not being able to deflate.
In my case, Eid expected me to start cycling definitely the first week, but even after 3-4 days. This was impossible. He was surprised on my slow recovery and swelling, but was convinced it was because of the factors described above, mostly the sclerotherapy. He was even worried that I might have an infection and kept asking me if I had a fever, increased pain or if my pump was stuck to my scrotum. All being bad signs of infection apparently. None of that happened, and it turned out there was no infection. At day 13 he inflated me and deflated me in his clinic (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=90#p37104). It hurt like hell, but he just laughed and said I was going to be fine. All was good. Not saying he would have that attitude towards someone of a bit more sensitive character than me, but we had a very straight talk communication towards each others, and I loved that.

Things took time, at least longer than I would have wished for. Plenty to read in the early pages of this thread on my recovery.
What is worth pointing out again and again though is that it takes time. You’ve got to let it take that time. In my case, I was more or less certain something had gone wrong. My pump pointing hard to my inner thigh the first ~week. The strong pain the first couple of weeks (my fear was screaming INFECTION). But all that was nothing. My pump position turned out to be great once the swelling subdued. My pain went away, and there was no infection. Allow things to settle and heal. You might be one of the lucky guys who are doing their work as a fireman two weeks after surgery. And if you go with Eid, you might be one of the guys who inflate/deflate by themselves after three days (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=40#p36845). But you might also need more time. Remember that and accept that.

First use
Was a slow jerk off the same day Eid activated me. That much for patience… (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=90#p37111).

Flight home
Was not fun but worked. I was flying business class with a flat seat which helped tremendously.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=140#p37430 and viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=150#p37493

Length and size early days
At day 16, my girth was same as pre-op, but my length was 1.5 cm shorter.
(viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=100#p37211).

First real use
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6010&start=160#p37582

Looking back at this early stage, I don’t really remember it as much negative. I know from reading my old posts that I was worried as hell, I thought my pain was really bad, I thought my results were not going to be very good, etc, etc, bla, bla, bla…
But I barely even remember any of those bad feelings today. I just look back at it as something I did which was simply just the right thing to do, and the first weeks after surgery – well who cares about them now?
So again, don’t care so much about those early issues. Easier said than done, I know. But that’s just temporary. It means nothing in the bigger picture.

Next: Results

[FreddyFree]

6 years update - Part two

Merrix, I enjoy reading your posts. I learn a lot too.

Thanks