Rare story - seeking advice

[newlyinjured87]

Hi everyone,

I've started reading these posts a few days ago and am impressed by all the knowledge in the community.

I'm 32 years old and recently (6 weeks ago) had a l5 s1 disc herniation doing some squats with relatively mid-weight. I could barely move for the rest of the day and improved rather quickly over 3 days. I didn't realize it was so bad as it was, until about a week later I noticed that I was intermittently losing my ability to get an erection, overall it was getting softer to the point where I couldn't manually stimulate myself to get hard. Though when I watched porn I was doing alright, so was confused and didn't know what was going on. Only had light tingling in my foot, so there didn't seem to be a major cause for emergency. (I had 1 week prior been cheated on and broken up with by a serious girlfriend and thought the ED was psychological and was impressed by how bad I thought it affected me).

Fast-forward, I urged the doctors to take it seriously, got an emergency MRI, they found the herniation, and I opted for microdiscectomy. During microdiscectomy they found a huge calcium deposit and cartilage on the nerves. I'm now 4 weeks since the microdiscectomy, and I now realize I think I've lost 95% if not 100 of my reflexive erection response. I can still get hard watching porn, but that even seems to be getting worse now. I was given cialis and slidenafil, each which helped a little in the beginning but seem to slowly be getting less effective.

I'm worried that I'm in a critical period to do something about this before it's too late, yet the doctors are finding it hard to believe I would have such a silent expression of complete loss of reflexive erections when I'm walking and recovering from surgery fine. I have read some medical journals that note some cases where this is possible with l5 s1 herniation yet rare.

So far, I've had my blood tested and testosterone is high, and had ultrasound on my penis and all was normal. I'm getting a pelvic MRI next week to see if there was more damage and another lumbar MRI to see if they got rid of all compression.

I'm trying to keep calm but also freaking out reading everything from stem cells, to steroid injections, to nutrition and implants (if it gets there) to see what I can do to live a full life being sexually active.

I'm hoping anyone here could have any suggestions. I have seen my spine surgeon and urologist but they seem hesitant to send me to a neurologist until they see how recovery goes, but it doesn't seem to be going great.

Thanks anyone for any help!

[bldoink]

Welcome to the forum.
I pray you find the answers and solutions you seek. Unfortunately I don't have anything to add other than good wishes and welcome.