Postby NYCGay » Thu Nov 25, 2021 9:13 pm
My life for the last month and a half has been dominated by complications I’ve had after my Rezūm procedure on October 12. It’s been a bit of a nightmare, but I’m finally getting better.
For those of you who don’t know, Rezūm is a procedure for shrinking an enlarged prostate. Water vapor is injected into the prostate, killing part of the tissue, thereby making the prostate smaller and less tight around the urethra. The end goal is that you’ll be able to piss like a race horse again and get off any medications you’ve been on for your BPH – benign prostate hyperplasia. And since it will be easier to empty your bladder completely before going to bed, you won’t have to go up so many times at night. (I guess that’s the basis for the name: you’ll get to rezzzume your sleep.)
But with Rezūm, things usually get worse before they get better. The procedure causes an inflammatory reaction that makes the prostate swell up, constricting the urethra even more. Typically, symptoms stabilize after two weeks; after four weeks, you’re supposed to be back to where you were before the procedure, and after six weeks, you may be able to get off your meds.
My trajectory hasn’t quite followed that timeline. I felt fine for the first two weeks. I left the hospital with a catheter, which I pulled out on the third day. On day 4, I hooked up with a guy and fucked him. (Only later, did I see online that you’re recommended to abstain from sex for a while after the procedure.) I rode my bike. (Only later, did I see online that you also shouldn’t bike.) I had some blood in my urine on the day I pulled out the catheter, which is expected, but none after that. My occasionally very weak stream was neither worse nor better than before, and I still went to the bathroom twice, sometimes three times, in a typical night.
Then, after two weeks, things rather suddenly got worse. On and off, I had a lot of blood in my urine, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that I couldn’t get my bladder empty. Starting to pee was easy, but every time, towards the end, when the stream slowed down, there was this weird burning pain inside me, not in the penis, but further back, and then it was as if everything cramped up, and I couldn’t finish. I never felt as if my bladder was empty; rather, I had a constant urge to pee, and when I say constant, I don’t mean frequent, I mean constant: the moment I stopped peeing, I still felt as if I needed to pee, but if I tried to pee more, it just hurt and only a few more drops came out. At night, I had to go to bed with the feeling of having a semi-full bladder, which feels awful when you want to relax and go to sleep. I had to get up to pee four or five times a night. I started taking sleeping pills.
After ten days of this, I went back to Dr. Eid, who was not quite as comforting as I would have hoped. He said the constant urge to pee gets better for most men. Just most? I asked. Yes, most, he confirmed. He was going to prescribe something for this overactive bladder syndrome, but after measuring my flow and concluding that it was too weak, he decided not too, since that medication could make the flow even weaker.
In the Uber back home, I called my partner and started weeping. What I had expected Dr. Eid to say was that I only needed to wait, and things would get better. But what he said was, basically, that I only had to wait and hope that things would get better. It seemed clear that he had expected me to be better at this point.
And a week later, things got worse. Starting to pee hadn’t been a problem up till then, so although I always felt like my bladder was half full, I never felt like I was about to burst. But suddenly I could only pee in tiny, intensely painful spurts. I thought drinking fluids might get things started, so I downed a couple of large cups of tea – which turned out to be a big mistake, because I still couldn’t pee, and now my bladder was filling up. It was 8:30 at night. There was no way I could get through the night like this. My partner and I took an Uber to the emergency room, which thankfully is only eight blocks away.
They took my blood pressure standing up, because trying to sit down seemed to put more pressure on my bladder. I was given a room, but I had to wait. I was now in real pain, and it’s so scary to feel as if you’re about to burst, but you still can’t pee. Imagine that you’re dying to pee, but you have to hold it, because there is no bathroom or other place where you can relieve yourself at hand. And then finally you get to a bathroom, expecting relief – but there is no relief, because you can’t pee, even though nothing seems to be preventing you, and the pressure just keeps building. So having to wait, I decided to go to the bathroom and try again. A tiny little spurt came out, perhaps a tablespoon or two, but the attempt caused such an intense pain that I screamed out loud.
Finally, a nurse and a doctor came and measured my bladder volume with ultrasound: 700 ml. I would have thought it was over a liter, based on how bad it hurt. The nurse put in a catheter, and within moments of the urine starting to flow, the pain was gone. replaced with an unbelievable relief.
I went back to see Dr. Eid the next day. He told me to keep the catheter till Monday, three days away, so that I would be able to come back to him if I still couldn’t pee after pulling it out. But the night between Saturday and Sunday, urine stopped coming into the catheter bag. I woke up about once an hour from an intense need to pee, and when I tried, urine came out on the outside of the catheter, which was painful but bearable. I figured that the catheter must have gotten clogged, and a clogged catheter is not really a catheter any longer, but rather a plug, so in the morning, I took an oxycodone, just in case, and pulled it out. The tip was, quite rightly, filled with clotted blood.
Ten minutes later, I had a moderate urge to pee. As I felt the urine start making its way through the urethra, I wondered if this was going to be painful. And then it just flowed, without any pain at all, a good stream, not lasting very long, but at this point, I wouldn’t have had much in my bladder, since I’d been peeing outside of the catheter all night long. Some large gelatinous blood clots came out too.
For a few hours, I felt as if my problems were completely gone. Everything felt normal again. Peeing was painless from start to finish, and my bladder felt empty when I was done. I even thought that perhaps I could quit the Flowmax now. But then the problems came creeping back. In the afternoon, we went to a restaurant. I had one single 16-ounce beer. I went to the bathroom to pee right before leaving. And yet, when walking home, I was overcome by a quickly intensifying urge to pee, and as I was unlocking our door, barely half an hour after I had peed in the restaurant, I lost control and wet myself. Haven’t done that in a few decades. But there was something oddly comforting about it, because it was in a way the opposite of what I had suffered a few days earlier, when the inability to pee forced me to the emergency room. Back then, I just couldn’t pee, and if it hadn’t been for the catheter, this inability might have lead to injury. This time, I tried not to pee, because it’s not convenient to pee in the middle of the street, but my body, in order to protect itself from injury, only cooperated up to a point, and then it let the urine flow; screw the social inconvenience.
The next day, I went to another urologist I’ve seen before, partly because his office is closer by than Dr. Eid’s, and partly because I wanted a second opinion. (I trust Dr. Eid implicitly when it comes to his speciality, i.e. implants, but I actually don’t know how many Rezūm procedures he performs; it’s not Rezūm he’s famous for.) This urologist, Dr. Mohammed Bhatti, was more comforting. He didn’t seem to find it remarkable that I had this overactive bladder syndrome at this point, five weeks out, and said he thought I would be very happy with the results in a couple of months. He replaced the Flomax with a stronger alternative, Silodosin, and put me on a medication to soothe my overactive bladder. (Perhaps the one that Dr. Eid had decided not to put me on.)
And this is where this downer of a journal entry will start getting brighter. It’s now been nine days since I saw Dr. Bhatti, and things have gotten significantly better since then. I still have sudden urges to pee, but I no longer constantly feel as if my bladder is half-full, and I’m no longer so uncomfortable when going to bed. I feel as if I’ve gotten my life back. That might sound overly dramatic, but for about three weeks, I was really miserable, and I just seemed to be getting worse. I mean, when you have to go to the emergency room to empty your bladder, then you do have a problem.
Now I’m even well enough so that my partner and I dared to go ahead with the vacation trip to Colombia that we had planned for this week, and that’s where I am now. I brought catheters, so that I can drain myself in case of another complete blockage.
Sex was not even a temptation during the weeks when I had the most problems, neither with my partner nor with anyone else. Everything just felt raw and wrong; all I longed for was to be able to empty my bladder.
But three days ago, here in Cartagena, we invited a local guy over to our AirBnB, a handsome, well-built 37-year-old, black or partly black, with a short-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, who smiled a lot and exuded vivacious energy. He spoke only limited English, and I only limited Spanish (and my partner none at all), but we still managed to make ourselves understood and talk about his job and his studies, and I was so into him. His only flaw, as far as I’m concerned, was the acrid taste of antiperspirant I got when I licked his armpit.
No discussions of roles were had before the act, but he responded favorably when I played with his ass while he was kissing my partner – he was an insatiable kisser. Due to lack of planning – I’ve been so focused on my bladder problems – we didn’t have any lube at hand, so I opened him up with my tongue, slathered him in spit, and then lined myself up, and slowly pushed inside. I had taken one of the 800mg Ibuprofen pills that Dr. Eid prescribed for me, because of the pain I’ve had while fucking. And now there was no pain, just a little bit of discomfort. But mainly, it felt great.
And how thrilling it is to have sex with someone you’re so into and who seemed to be so into me and my partner and perhaps also just into having sex in general. He came rather quickly, a little too quickly, I thought, until I realized that this didn’t mean that he was done. He kept his cockring on, stayed hard, and seemed eager to continue to play, not just trying to get me and my partner to come too.
I didn’t come at all. At least for the time being, I can only come by myself or with my partner. The Flomax I’ve been on for a year, and the Silodosin that Dr. Bhatti replaced it with, both cause retrograde ejaculations, meaning, my orgasms are dry. Also, I don’t orgasm easily; I usually have to finish with my own hand. But when I try to jerk myself off while a sex-partner is watching me, waiting for me to shoot, I get self-conscious, knowing that I won’t shoot even if I orgasm, and then I can’t orgasm at all. I hope I’ll be able to get off both Silodosin and Flomax once I’ve healed a little more from the Rezūm procedure, and that I will be able to ejaculate again. But till then, I try not to focus on my inability to come. Rather, I focused on reveling in the beauty of this man and the thrill of his reactions as I fucked him. He rode my cock, with me on my back, and shot a second time, all over my chest.
But even that was not the end of it for him. He did take his cockring off, and we talked and caressed for a while, and then caressed and kissed, and he grew hard again, and I pushed inside him one more time, and he came a third time. Some guys just are amazing, and sex can be such an intense and wonderful way of connecting with another human being.
