My Journal

[merrix]

Merrix,
I wanted to ask you about your paragraph "Number of Pumps".
You said that after 4 months it was 27, and after 7 months it was 36.
What is the difference between doing 27 back then, versus, stopping at 27 right now? Would you be smaller,softer, or less erect?
Put another way, what impact did being able to do 9 extra pumps give you?
I realize that not all pumps are equal and that I am only 5 weeks post surgery(coloplast), but seems I can get a firm horizontal erection with just 9 (almost wall to wall) pumps, and then cannot pump any more - of course extra length would always be welcome...

Good question.

The difference is substantial.
First, let me say that I don't and never did use my maximum #of pumps for sex. I only pump up to max when 'cycling' the implant. But anyway, here is a thorough answe to your question.

Back when my max was 27, I was still experimenting with my optimum sex-pump-level. I remember trying to go up to 20-22, but disliking it. I have written extensively about that in previous posts, but in short I thought at that time that it was too hard for sex. Or more accurately, that there was not enough flex in the base for good sex. I thought it made it hard to 'point' the dick in a perfect line along my wife's vagina, and hence it did feel uncomfortable, or even painful. All because the lack of base flex. My glans didn't engorge as well at 20 pumps as at 16 either.
So for those reasons I used 16 for sex.
At that time I still wasn't convinced about the implant's greatness, and honestly a bit disappointed in the hardness. I would say today that the hardness at 16 pumps was slightly less than my best day Viagra-erection. Which was just like any healthy natural erection.
In terms of objective measures, the 16 pumps probably pointed at 2:45-3:00 (don't 100% remember now), and I know for a fact I could hang a bath towel on it. But it gave a bit from the towel's weight and probably fell just below 3:00 from the towel.
When pumping full at 27 at that time I remember thinking it was crazy hard. Pointing around 2:30 and with minimal flexibility at the base. The shaft itself was unbendable. I remember trying to hang two bath towels on it and it didn't flex below 3:00.

Before my summer holiday I could get in 39 pumps. During the holiday, for practical reasons, I cut back on the cycling from around 3 times in 2 days to around 2 times in 3 days. That took the max back down to around 37 again.
For sex, I keep on gradually increasing the level. It seems I was wrong in terms of the minimal base flex being a geometrical problem (pointing the dick parallell inside the vagina and feeling discomfort when not). It was simply my soft tissue still not completely healed. Now, at an even higher number of pumps, there is no discomfort at even lower level of base flex. I just remember feeling the implant in me during sex at a too high pump-level before. Not a nice feeling. Uncomfortable and unnatural. That level has simply been pushed further now. I have been using 25, then 26, 27, 28, and last time tried 29 for the first time. No problem! I don't feel the implant in me and it feels totally like a natural erection.

The hardness definitely increases with no. of pumps, so my sex hardness now is like my max before. And it is very hard. My glans nowadays engorges completely at 29 pumps, while it didn't at 20 a few months ago. Has the cycling stretched things out and created space for the spongiasum?
Also, the combination of the more pumps used and my length increase (16 cm to 17.4 inflated) has made the foreskin retract at a tighter fit which also increases feeling.
Bath towels? It's a silly question in my case. If I hang a bath towel on my 29 pumps sex-dick, it doesn't move. It is not even noticeable. My dick still points at 2:30. I can easily hang 2-3 of them before it starts to feel a bit uncomfortable, but the dick still stands clearly higher than 3:00.

Finally, when I pump 37-39 pumps, it gives crazy hard a new meaning. This is truly crazy. Just as at 29 but taken to the next level. I still feel strong discomfort when pumping full. The feeling at 39 now is the same as at 27 before. Pain in tip and just a general unpleasant feeling in every mm3 of my dick.
But the level this feeling sets in at keeps being further pushed and so does the level where I feel no discomfort at all.
I don't know where it will all end. There is a finite limit to max pumps where there is no more fluid in the reservoir, and where the cylinders simply cannot stretch anymore. Maybe I have reached that limit at 39 or maybe the progress will continue.

It is also funny that the 16 I used for 'good' sex before feels more like a semi now, even though it is exactly as hard as the 16 was then in an objective comparison.

At 9 pumps, my dick is just about reaching 3:00 and could technically be used for sex. But the hardness (shaft and base flex) would be a shadow of my 29 hardness, and my foreskin would not at all be as tight and stretched as at 29.

My conviction is (based on personal experience and logical reasoning) that any implant will always be harder when inflated with 20 pumps than when with 15 pumps.
But 20 pumps in one implant is not necessarily harder than 15 in another implant.
One simple reason is cylinder size. A smaller cylinder will be at maximum pressure (and hence hardness) at fewer pumps than a larger cylinder.
So I guess it is possible that someone with a 12 cm implant can be harder at 12 pumps than a guy with a 24 cm implant is at 18 pumps.

Finally, it is also my conviction that less RTE gives better hardness. Maybe it as simple as it because the flex point (where RTE and inflatable cylinder connects) is pushed closer to the penis base with long RTEs. Maybe it is because the fixed part back in the crus eventually widens the crus enough to fit a bit looser than originally, or than a longer inflatable part of the cylinder would have. Or maybe there are other reasons.
Again, this is not to say that all men with no RTE have harder dicks than all men with 3 cm RTE. But probably on average and definitely it would have that effect in a theoretical world where all other factors where kept identical. That is however not the case, and in reality RTEs are only one of many factors impacting hardness.

Good luck with your new Titan. Just keep pumping and slowly and steadily push both your comfort level and your max level. Eventually you'll have the hardest dick on the planet. Well, you'll be sharing that #1 with a few other Bionic guys, but chances are slim your partners will ever have been with one of them...

[palace01]

VERY informative - Thanks...

[MARKOS2018]

Merrix

Always learn something new from you! You are definitely the stat guy and the one to rely on for information. I have found that I like less pumps too for sex. I feel more and if we go for the marathon I can cum quite easily. If it is pumped to the fullest I can't feel much at all and it takes me a hell of a long time to get to orgasm. I have to wipe a lot and resume so there is more friction. With your explanations and our situations become clearer. I have accepted the implant as is and Dr. Eid really didn't go into it much with me. I didn't ask for anything except a working dick that wouldn't lose any girth or length. You did the right thing by going for the last "frontier". You are enjoying your sex life immensely and bet your wife really appreciates that. There is no more hems and haas? What a friggin relief it is.

Thanks again for the great post.

All we have to do it pump it up.....

Mike

[merrix]

Nine months. Not much considering the plan is to have the implant another 40 years or so. But it’s long enough, I think, to have reached some sort of ’steady state’. I think I have reached ’steady state’ in terms of healing, handling, usage. Only major issue not under my belt yet in terms of experience is revision.
So here is my update, written 30000 feet up in the sky, somewhere over Russia, while enjoying a few glasses of wine. If my text below isn’t clear and understandable, it may mean I had a couple of glasses too many…

Sex
Absolute success. Being able to is the prerequisite. You can talk all day about size, positions, desire, partners, oral, anal, exciting places to have sex, etc. But if you cant’t get that little fucker up and keep it up, then none of that matters. The raw physical ability to get and keep it up overshadows all else.
As I have described before, it is a learning curve, especially for someone like me who has had various degree of ED all my life, to learn how to have sex without any constraints and limitations from an erection perspective. Habits formed as a necessity due to circumstances during 25 years don’t just go away over night. But I have come a long way and likely still have some further way to go.
But wherever this ends, it is great already.

Awkwardness due to the unnatural way of getting hard
This was a huge issue to me initially. It felt bad having to manually pump the dick up before sex. It felt weird and almost gave me the same kind of feelings of being impotent as it did when failing to keep the erection before surgery.
But everything becomes normal. So does this, and the end justifies the means.
I could see this being more of a problem if one was having frequent short term relations. But I guess if I was in that situation, I’d find a satisfactory way to deal with that as well. Again, what is better? Picking up a sexy woman, bring her home, getting ready to go and the prick dick won’t stand hard, or picking up that same sexy woman, bring her home and pump the dick up in the bathroom when it is time to go, and then being able to focus on having a good time.

Quality of erection
First of all, I’d like to say that in my opinion and in my case, the quality of the erection is still highly depending on natural blood flow. The implant fills up the cavernosa. Not the spongiasum or the glans. And an erection with no blood flow to the latter two is light years behind one that has. I think I was lucky to do the sclerotherapy treatment before the implant surgery. What it did fix was my glans. It gets very hard when I am aroused. What it didn’t fix good enough was my basic erection, the shaft. The implant does take care of that 100% though.
When I am aroused, the spongiasum fills up enough to make the shaft naturally round, while the glans hardens nicely.
After I orgasm, my glans and spongiasum empties, as it naturally would, but my shaft of course stays hard. To keep the intercourse going in this state, with a softer glans and without proper levels of blood in the spongiasum, is nowhere near the same pleasant experience. It feels very unnatural as I for sure feel the implant inside me during intercourse. It is not at all comfortable. Before orgasm, with blood flow, I don’t feel the implant at all. It feels just like a natural erection.
Hence, I think this must be part of anyones expectations before getting an implant. If you don’t get any blood flow at all to the glans, don’t expect an implant to restore your erection quality to the good old days before your ED hit you. Expect the implant to give you a hard, oval shaft and a soft glans. That is still better than a limp useless dick. But it has it’s imperfections.

Length and girth
Before my surgery I was the same 16-16.5 cm (6.3”-6.5”) that I have been as long as I can remember.
My girth was the same 14 cm (5.5”) as it has always been.
Right after surgery, when starting cycling, my girth was bigger (~0.2 cm or 0.1”) and my length was shorter (1-1.5 cm or 0.4”-0.6”). However, the girth was only bigger due to swelling. When it went away, I was down to 13.5 cm (5.3”), or 0.5 cm (0.2”) thinner than pro-op.
Both my length and girth has slowly been increasing since then, and now I am 17.5 cm (6.9”) long and 14.2 cm (5.6”) girth. This is larger, both in length and girth, than before surgery. Length is about 1 cm (0.4”) larger, and girth is about 0.2 cm (0.1”) larger. Not much difference, and really nothing I care about, but nevertheless, it is a fact that I do have a larger dick now than before surgery.
And for the record, for all you size freaks out there, my wife says that she doesn’t feel the difference in the size. So apparently, the size change I had is not enough for women (or not for her at least) to notice. That should logically imply that anyone losing the same size I gained, wouldn’t need to worry either. Because logically that should not be noticed either.

Hinge, angles, bath towels and kept promises
What is the hinge effect? My meaning is a dick that may be hard from shaft to tip, but one that can ’flex’ at the base. Imagine taking a stick and taping it to a wall. The stick itself is stiff and hard, but it would hang straight down along the wall. It could be rotated and pointed up, down, left, right with no resistance at the point it is taped to the wall.
In my case, there is basically no hinge at all. Well, some, but very little. It also depends how much I pump. These days I can get around 40 full pumps in. If I do that, there is basically no hinge, or flex, at all. I could hang a few bath towels over the shaft of my dick and it still points above 3:00. I could not bend it up to touch my abs either. The angle would be around 2:00-2:30.
If pumping it to the level I use for sex, i.e. 30 pumps, It still points at around 2:30, and still has very little hinge or flex. I still could not point it up to touch my abs, and pointing it down to 3:00 would definitely make me feel a good stretch. This is great as it allows me to take very, very deep strokes inside my wife without risking slipping out. Same thing if she’s on top, she can really go all the way up.
As for the shaft, it is seriously as hard as any artificial object. A stick, a rod, or whatever.
Why was I lucky to end up like this, while as some guys here describe how their inflated dicks point at 4:00 to 5:00, and can be bent 180 degrees from straight up to straight down with little or no resistance?
Well, first of all, I don’t think it was much luck. My doc told me already ahead of the surgery, that when using my size of cylinders (24 cm), the superior way to avoid the hinge effect is to use Titan cylinders (according to him there is a difference in hardness between a Titan and an AMS, but this difference is more obvious the larger the cylinder size) and to use none or minimal size RTE.
So just as he promised me I would not lose any size, he promised me that I would get a hard dick without any hinge effect. And he was right in both cases.
Was that something he just said, always says, and then he’s just lucky sometimes (as in my case), and sometimes those promises are just not kept? Well there is of course no way I could know that. All I know is my own case. And he kept every word of what he promised. Besides myself, I have seen one of his other patients’ dick as well. Day before my surgery, there was a patient who had his surgery a few days ago who agreed to let me see his result. He was already inflating less than a week after surgery, and his dick sure pointed nicely up at 2:30, with a minimal hinge. Just like mine. So of the two Eid-dicks I have seen, both have been great in this sense.

Daily life interference
Does the implant ever negatively affect my regular life? The short answer is no. I still do all what I did before, including working out with decent weights in all the basic compound barbell exercises (deadlifts for reps @ 400 pounds, squats for reps @ 300 pounds, rows, presses).
I sit all day normally when working. I still ride my bike for leisure (never did use it for exercise, it is probably the exercise form I hate the most on this planet).
I still play decent level (5.0) of competitive singles tennis.
The only time I ever feel it is either when bending down to tie my shoes, especially if wearing tight pants, and when I play with my daughter in the swimming pool and she accidentally pokes my crotch. Just seems I am a bit more sensitive for that now than before.
But overall, there is no negative impact. I just keep going like before.

Wife’s view of her husband going bionic
She was for sure skeptical before I went ahead. She was simply afraid things would go to hell. Because we did have something before, we had a sex life. It might not have been the best, but we had something. Well, on one of my good days, it was really good, but I had bad days as well, and they were not good at all…
But still, she thought we had something to lose. And if things would go really bad, we would have lost what we had.
On the other hand, she agreed to the idea that if things would go well, it would be great to just never needing to worry about this issue.
She has had her learning curve as well, just like me, after the implant. She has, just like me, adjusted her habits in bed to constantly work around my ED. Short foreplay with focus on me, short and intense intercourse has been the way to go for us. So just like I have been forced to learn to just relax and learn to enjoy the moment without always thinking of how to make sure we reach the end, she has had to do the same. Learn to enjoy the moment, understand that there is plenty of time for her now.
I think we are both there already, and we’re having a great time. However, I don’t know what the end status is on this learning curve. Can it possibly get even better? Who knows. Time will tell.

Cycling routine
So far I have been cycling the implant probably around 10 times per week on average. Maybe slightly less, but for sure at least once per day on average. Not necessarily every day, but for sure more than 7 times per week on average. Let’s say 8-10 times per week on average. For some periods, more often.
This has left me with a larger dick now than before implant, my maximum number of wall-to-wall pumps has increased from around 20-25 to 40, and the number of pumps I comfortably use for sex has increased from around 15 to 30.
I still believe there is a rather linear relationship between frequency of usage and time to revision. If continuous size gain was the only possible advantage of frequent cycling from now on, I’d most likely reduce the frequency of cycling. But the thing is that I feel the implant just works better, or feels better, when used, if I inflate it often. And that is worth the world to me. So I’ll keep inflating around 7 times per week, and the day it breaks down, then so be it. I agree with people who have written here that it would be weird to go through this hell (having ED for life first and then a pretty painful decision process followed by a pretty painful surgery) just to back off on maximizing the pleasure from it in fear of a breakdown. Fuck it. It’ll break when it breaks, and then I’ll have to replace it. I am just above 40 years old with a wife my age but with a body of a fit 30 year old woman. Now is the payback time. The coming five years will be the best five years of my life in terms of sex, and I won’t let fear of an upcoming revision destroy it.
And for the records, I spoke with my doc about the rumor here about the reliability issues of the Titan Touch pump (or was it the Titan OTR? people here seem to confuse the two). He said he had done 500 implants with the Touch pump so far, and not even one revision because of pump failure so far. He did have a few on the older model, the OTR, though. Issues have been jammed deflate valves and problems with tubing connections. We all know Eid is a Titan advocator (and so am I), but he did say that to be fair, if mentioning a few revisions of OTR pumps, he should also mention more frequently patients with larger dicks (and hence longer cylinders) are coming to him complaining of lack of erection quality of their AMS implants and doing revisions to swap to Titans. And as always, different docs will have different opinions, and different posters on FT will have their different bias. Take my words for what they are. Just one guy's reference to one doc. Not the universal super truth. Build your own knowledge, make up your own mind.

Inflating, deflating and flaccid
I do need, as said above, 30 pumps to reach what I think is the perfect level for sex. This takes me well over a minute. I haven’t timed it (next time I will actually!), but for sure, one pump takes more than one second. I can do around 20 with one hand, even though the last five of those 20 will be difficult and high risk (slipping), and the last 10-15 pumps must be made with two hands.
The Touch pump works very well. It is truly just one touch that is needed. Or rather one firm squeeze of the deflate valve. I just press it firmly for 1-2 seconds and then my dick drains nicely down to almost empty. It goes down to a level which corresponds to around 5 pumps I’d say. If I want to completely empty it, I’d have to press and squeeze my dick and my perineal area. Normally, after sex, I just press the deflate button and then leave it as is till next morning when I completely empty it. Pressing the deflate valve once is an easy thing to do, and the dick goes down in a quite natural way, while as lying on my back and squeezing the dick with one hand and my perineal area with the other isn’t natural at all, and something I prefer to do when alone.
My flaccid was an issue in the early days. Now it isn’t. It hangs nicely down at the best angle it can. Normally around 5:00-5:30 I’d say. It is pretty big, around 14 cm (5.5”), but it is no issue. It is pliable enough to just be bunched down my pants and doesn’t look strange in any way even with tight jeans or suit pants.

Natural look
I would say that my implant (or pump) cannot be seen. If anyone would see me in the shower, nobody could see anything. The pump sits hidden behind the balls, and behind the dick of course. Even if I lift my dick up, the pump is not seen as it is behind the balls. I remember I posted some pics of this a few months ago.
When inflated, it is still not seen.
However, if a woman gives my a blowjob and she touches and sucks my balls (which in my opinion is a basic component of any good blowjob), she will for sure notice the pump unless she is retarded or unconscious-level drunk.
My tubing can be felt if one touches on the right spot, but it is on the side (in the groin basically) and I think most women would never feel the tubing since they would have no business pressing their fingers in my groin.
Anyway, for me as a married man, this is not a problem at all. Could maybe be if I was single, but I think I’d easily learn to deal with that as well.

Curvature
Before surgery, I had a pretty bad curvature. It was probably pointing close to 45 degrees to the left. Dr. Eid said I probably had some degree of Peroynies. I have the Titan 24 cm cylinders, no RTE on one side or anything, and my curvature is basically gone. There is a tiny little bend, but so small that it is barely noticeable. 5 degrees perhaps.
If I completely deflate my dick by pressing it and the perineal area, I do however have a slight bend when flaccid. This is due to the cylinders buckling in the flaccid state. This is something I don’t care about, but if I would be in a public changing room shower and this was a problem, I could easily solve it by giving my dick 3-5 pumps. This doesn’t noticeable raise the angle, but it fills up the cylinders enough to straighten.

Alright, I think that was it. Time to fold down the seat, put in the earplugs and get some sleep now. Take care Bionic Brothers.

[Jimbruski]

Merrix

Thanks for the very complete update. Any questions I might have had, you answered. I wish you the best of luck for the future.

Jimbruski

[PFracture]

Hi merrix! I was delighted to read such a detailed account of your experience so far. Awesome that you are being able to overcome ED. Please, keep us updated on this as time passes by. Despite some people criticising you so much, i loved your radical approach and way of thinking and putting certain dogmas here into questions.

Even if one is to cast doubt on some of the things you said, you made a lot of legitimate questions of things i had thought myself but never posted here. Who knows i will write about them in the future.

Enjoy it!

[merrix]

Thanks Jimbruski and PFracture. Good to hear someone appreciates reading my long updates. If nobody does, then there would be no point wasting an hour writing it.

Well PFracture... I don't know if I'd say I was criticized. I probably was giving more criticism than I received, so I am ok with people expressing disagreement. But it did sort of both piss me off and make me laugh my ass off how someone can be so stupid to accuse me of actually being Dr. Eid.
Read my journal from the beginning and that should be quite obvious.

I have lived long enough, met enough people, to know that my frank style will not go down well with everybody. I never give a fuck though as long as I am objective and focused on facts, statements and actions, not on people and personality.

I plan to keep updating once per month and except for that time, when I may take the chance to get involved in some other topics, just stay logged off.

Good luck to you.

[lapiste]

Very inspiring update! It gives me a lot of hope. Many thanks!

[cumstein]

Finally read this complete thread. Outstanding, detailed, well thought out piece of work. I will see Eid for surgery in November. I was concerned about complications since its a long flight to go back and forth to NY. However, Makes sense to take a break for a few weeks or more and book a hotel in NYC. Also makes sense to take the pain meds up front and not let pain get ahead of you. Been there, done that with a nasty shoulder surgery. I guess one should expect a tough 4=6 weeks, and then another 6 or 7 months to get everything optimized unless you are lucky and have no problems. Seems like there will be issues to resolve while you are there, even if its just the peace of mind you get from seeing Dr. Eid. Helps to know that if Dr Eid says something will resolve, it most likely will. I have a much better understanding of the process now.
Can anyone recommend a better hotel? IF I am going to be cooped up for 2 or 3 weeks, at least part of its going to be in nice surroundings with room service! .

thanks again for the great journal and I hope to see updates.

[merrix]

Thanks cumstein, and glad to be of help.
I can, as you have read, only say the best of Dr. Eid. Surely there are other good docs out there, but I can only speak for the one I used - and he was great.
The pain and long recovery period I had afterwards wasn't typical. In my case, two (or maybe three) issues combined to extend my recovery time.
1 - The sclerotherapy surgery I had 5 months before the implant surgery. Seems due to the closed veins my draining capacity was reduced and hence more blood stayed in my dick and caused more swelling.
2 - The long surgery time. Eid first put in 22 cm cylinders. Thought there was room for more and added 1 cm RTEs. Thought there was still room for more, ripped out the whole implant, threw it in the bin and inserted a new 24 cm implant without RTEs. Hence there was more trauma caused during a longer period of time than usual.
3 - I was stupid to not stop taking my fish oil supplements, which I take in pretty high doses (6 grams per day), well before surgery. This has a blood thinning effect and can have caused more bleeding. I also kept taking my 5mg daily Cialis too close to surgery, should have stopped that earlier as well.

There are others here who have reported much less pain than what I have, and Eid's standard recommendation is maximum one week in hotel for long distance flight patients. I surely noticed that he was genuinely concerned, worried and even surprised at my long-lasting pain after surgery, which was evident by his two visits to my hotel. I guess that is something he doesn't (need to) do with all patients.
It should also be mentioned that I could have made it back home earlier as well if I really wanted to, probably after 10 days rather than 20 days. And I would have left earlier if I had an empty home with only my family to go home to. But during those two weeks, around christmas and new year's, we had the house full of guests, and there would have been no way I could have hidden my pain for all those guests, which would have put me in a situation where I would have been forced to make up some lies about my condition which I didn't want to. Hence, I just stayed in NY and blamed some serious issues at work in Asia that I needed to deal with as the reason I couldn't travel back to Scandinavia for the holidays.

Also, I did actually start inflating/deflating on day 13, which is still quite early I think. I had sex after three weeks, but that would probably been earlier if I had met my wife earlier. I didn't see her till 3 weeks after surgery, and jumped her the first night... So in that perspective, my recovery was actually quite fast.

Finally, even though I like to think of myself as a macho man with a high pain threshold, as all men do, who knows. Maybe I am just a fucking pussy who was whining about pain that others would have thought was nothing..? I don't like that idea, but I cannot completely rule it out.

I think that many doctors (well perhaps 99% of them) would not have done what Eid did. After inserting the first 22 cm implants, they would have settled and not tried for more. I would have ended up with either the 22 cm cylinder or the 22 + 1cm RTE setup, and would hence have had an inferior outcome in terms of rigidity and length compared to what I now got. The extended recovery time due to the longer procedure is something I don't care about now. It is behind me and now I am just happy that I got the best possible outcome.
What Eid did for me is again the flip side of another coin. We all know he is a Titan advocator. But his concentration of his business with Coloplast also means he has the best possible relationship with them. Hence he can get away occasionally with throwing an implant in the bin during surgery to maximize size. Something probably Colopast would have charged a low-volume guy for, and hence that low-volume guy would have left the first implant in the patient's dick and robbed him of the length gain I actually got. Pros and cons with everything...

As for the hotel, yes it wasn't the best. But not that bad either. Main problem in my case was the lack of room service. On the other hand, there was plenty of restaurants in the neighborhood delivering to the hotel room.
The good thing about it was still that it was 200 meters from Eid's office, so even with my bad initial pain, I could always make that short walk to see him whenever I wanted to. Which I did three times per week for the whole three weeks I stayed there.

Good Luck!