Postby NYCGay » Thu May 06, 2021 7:41 am
Five days before surgery.
My partner picked up all the prescriptions from the pharmacy for me: a bag full of medications. I need to read through the post-op instructions again to remind me what all of them are and which ones I’m allowed to take together, and which ones must not be mixed. I’m glad to have strong pain killers at hand if I need them.
After my final pre-op visit with Dr. Eid in the city on Monday, I had dinner with a guy that I had a single sexual encounter with two or three years ago: a handsome rugby player in his late twenties, friendly and vivacious. Now he’s in a non-open relationship, so sex was never on the table for Monday night. But feeling relaxed with him, I told him of the reason for my doctor’s visit and my upcoming surgery, and I showed him the pump, attached to a ring, like a key fob, that I had been given to familiarize myself with. He had never hard of penile implants before, but was curious and asked questions: will I be pumping up my dick with air? (No, saline solution, from a reservoir in my abdomen.) Will the pump replace one of my testicles. (No, it will be hidden between and behind them, if the surgeon does his job well.)
I don’t even have my implant yet, and yet, it felt easier to tell him about it now than it would have felt telling him about my injections that time when we had sex. I remember the night well. I injected a small dose right before he arrived at our house, so I would be engorged as we started by having a beer in the hot tub, and then, as we got up to go to the bedroom, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and injected a larger dose. It was an great night, in large part because it had been made clear beforehand that he would do all the topping, so there was no pressure on me to be rock hard; being large and hardish was enough; it gave him plenty to hold on to during his athletic pounding. And yet I remember feeling a tinge of disappointment at the end that I was already more softish than hardish, just tumescent, really; the effect of the injections is never very long-lasting for me.
This is all of course subject to change, but as of now, I don’t think I’ll be overly secretive about the implant with sex partners. If someone asks me about that thing in my ballsack, I think I’ll probably say: It’s my pump; I have an implant. If the guy is bothered by that, then I’ll break it off, without apology, but also without reproach. I’ll tell him that I understand, and that I perhaps would have reacted the same way myself in his situation (though really, I don’t think I would). If, on the other hand, he’s fine with it, or even, like the handsome rugby player, curious about it, then we can have a great time and I can give him my undivided attention, without wasting part of it on worrying about whether I’m still hard enough or how many minutes I still have at my disposal.
I’ve had three show-and-tells with guys here from FrankTalk, two over video calls, and one in person. They were all valuable experiences, and I’m grateful to these three men. I don’t think I would have dared take this decision so quickly without those experiences. The guy I met with in person let me touch his dick, first when flaccid. I could feel the cylinders and the tips in the glans, and while it felt different than a non-implanted dick, it didn’t really feel weird. I could imagine it just being some cartilage or something that he happens to have and I don’t. He showed me how to pump and he let me try it, and it was easy enough. When his cock was hard, it felt like any hard cock: warm and pliable skin covering a hard core. It was great to conclude that this was a cock that I could have related to sexually.
Lately, I’ve found myself revisiting some previous sexual encounters in my mind, meetings that meant something to me, with guys I really liked, but that were all, to some degree, marred by having to be planned around the injections and the decision of whether to hide them or be open about them. I’ve replayed the scenes in my head and imagined how they could have played out if I had had the implant instead of the injections (I could have pumped myself up right there in the hot tub, hidden under the streams of air bubbles). I've thought about how much more fun and rewarding they could have been if so much of my attention hadn’t been spent on obsessing about the state of my erection (and, of course, obsessing about it never made it better). What if I could have just have focused on the pleasure, the thrill, and the connection?
What I hope to get from the implant is not just the ability to get and stay hard, but also, equally important, the freedom of not having to think about it.
Somehow the thought of having a large and full flaccid doesn't bother me at all. (I realize I may live to regret saying that. One guy wrote in his journal that his flaccid initially pointed at 2:30. You call that flaccid? That's about two hours higher than my current hardons.)
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