How long are you obligated to suffer?

[Nocturne]

I don’t think I need an implant yet. I take a pile of supplements every day. Along with 2.5 mg Cialis EOD, Clomid to bring my abysmal testosterone levels up to low-middling, etc. My heart is a mess, aortic valve stenosis and premature CAD in my early 40s, and of course ED.

When my ED strikes, it’s traumatic not only for the usual reasons but also because I know it is ultimately caused by the same crap that caused my heart issues - insanely high Lp(a) caused by having two copies of a mutant gene that elevates Lp(a) into the stratosphere and gives you aortic valve stenosis. Every time my dick fails, my nose is rubbed in the fact that I’ve got heart disease WAY before most people have to even think about it, and I’m most likely going to die young. Fun fun fun!!!

I’m lucky in that my wife loves sex, and when she is not busy she wants it very often. She wanted it three times yesterday, and I rose to the occasion well. Tonight she wanted more and I had issues, partly because our daughter knocked on the door and would not let up until she got her damn iPad out of our room. Wife was very cool about it - she always is - but I felt the usual stressed and useless and horrid because she deserves better than a prematurely broken down guy with weird health issues. Oh, and had my nose rubbed in the fact that I am slowly dying too, and will be fitted for a coffin years before I should have to expect.

Worried that I’ll wait to get the damn implant right through your hyper sexual menopausal period and then finally get it done JUST when she doesn’t want sex anymore. Or right when I have a stroke. Har de har har. Get the JOKE?!!

My health issues have shown me that God can be one sick fucker with a twisted sense of humor, so I often think of the outcome that would most be viewed as “funny” by a sadistic pervert and worry that that is in fact the way things will go. Hasn’t been far so far.

My question is, how long are we obligated to suffer before getting implanted? I have read “not until you are completely nonfunctional”, but to me that means suffering through dwindling ability for maybe ten more years and then finally being granted permission to get fixed RIGHT when it’s too late, due to wife losing interest, debilitating stroke, or just a plain old death during heart surgery or heart attack. The debilitating stroke is probably the sickest one so the one I should be worried about the most - being stuck in a chair, unable to talk, and left with no realistically attainable goals other than death. Right after getting the green light for surgery. Get the JOKE?!?

[dg_moore]

I have no comforting words to impart, but I think my signature below sums things up pretty well.

[Anonymous3]

Sorry see nothing funny about it. I inow you are trying to make light of a bad situation. I would suggest you and your wife talk to an implant specialist and have the work up done. The dr have ways of document that the implant is mecical necessity. They have to show that other methods are not effective or causing more harm

[Nocturne]

Sorry, I'm being kind of a whiny bitch and I know it. It just fucking sucks. All of it.

dg__moore, I remember you and your story. It is part of what got me thinking that sooner might be better than later.

hturner12, I know there is nothing funny about it. At all. It's sick.

For a little background, in my early-mid 20s I was trapped in a marriage with a woman who shut down sexually to an almost complete degree due to her severe depressive issues, which left me with some degree of trauma and distrust. After the divorce, part of me assumed that ALL women would do that, and the fact that my current wife was SO sexually "insatiable" when we met was something I really needed her to be in order for me to be able to trust her enough to get serious. She has told me that she has "scared men away" because of her high level of desire, has sometimes felt that there was something "wrong" with her (she got her testosterone levels checked many years ago because she worried she might have too much), etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with her -- she is perfect -- and as I say I needed her to be as she is in order to trust her enough to get to where we are.

But now I know she tries not to hurt me, and I worry that she hesitates in telling me when she wants sex, because she knows it can give me anxiety when things don't work out. And I feel like absolute shit over it because I feel like I am doing to her, what my ex did to me. I know self-loathing is a normal state for a guy with ED to be in, but this makes it even worse. Is this just a long-in-coming punishment for leaving my ex in my 20s? Why punish my wife too? She didn't do anything!

And she has been very open about letting me sleep with other women over the years -- something I have not done a lot of, only once every five years or so while alone on vacation. But now, of course I realize that if she got sick of waiting for my dick to start working, she'd be perfectly justified in finding someone else to meet her needs. And how could I object? To be honest I probably would not mind much so long as I was functional and able to take care of her myself when she came home, but if I'm reduced to eating some other dude's spunk out of her pussy... God.

And she's hitting a period of life where I think her change is coming soon, and her desire level is higher than it might used to be -- and she now has a job with better hours and less stress, so she wants it more. Is all that going to be thrown away because Mister Limp Dick came calling with his friends Busted Heart and Fucked Up Genome? Is that fair to her? Is waiting to get implanted tantamount to settling for being "only a LITTLE below average, if you take your pills and stuff..."? What guy wants to be "only a LITTLE below average" in the bedroom?

I read this forum and see guys who have lost all functionality and lived that way for years, and I can't decide if it would be more horrible to have that happen to me and not be able to live with it, or to have it happen AND LIVE WITH IT. I have a lot of sympathy for so many guys here -- and at the same time, I recognize that ED is basically the only medical problem I have that can actually GET BETTER EVENTUALLY -- once I get implanted.

I feel like I have enough to agonize over with my heart, blood cholesterol, and now prediabetes issues WITHOUT ED being in the mix at all. I see guys here talking about ED being "in the past" for them and I think, "Yes, that is what I want, and I don't want to miss an opportunity to get it."

I'm 44 and will probably have about 20 more years left to live barring any other medical surprises (HA!). So an implant now might realistically require one replacement. Should I wait ten years and risk falling victim to another "gift" from life before I get the chance?

OTOH I don't really think I NEED an implant right now. I'm functional MOST of the time, if not able to do everything I used to be able to do. Sex standing up in the shower is weak when it is even possible, I lose wood if the dog won't stop barking or the phone rings, I can't seem to orgasm in her mouth or from a hand job (I tend to wilt during them), etc. How long to wait?

I know the standard answer, but my body is sadly not standard and I'm not going to live as long as I should. AND I'll have to have open heart surgery sometime in the next ten years or so -- which will probably coincide with when I might qualify for an implant, but supercede it, because that would be really "funny".

I hate feeling like this. I hate BEING like this. I hate how fucked up my life got because of two copies of a fucking mutant gene I then went and gave to ALL of my kids because I have no other fucking option, and wasn't aware of at the time.

[Nocturne]

All right. Enough agonizing. Something productive is needed.

I want to hear from anyone here who has gotten an implant BEFORE losing complete functionality. Before needing penile injections, even before the pills stopped working altogether. Is there anyone here like that? What is your story? Why did you decide to get your implant earlier than most are advised to? As I understand it you are "supposed" to use the pills until they stop altogether, then the injections until they stop altogether, then a pump and cock ring until you realize that pumps and cock rings suck -- and THEN you are allowed to get an implant, after a decade or more of futzing around wasting your life on mediocre sex and trying to pretend you don't feel like shit about yourself.

[dcmusc]

I think I might fit the profile you are looking for, we will see. I started noticing a change in my ability to have a hard erection every time about 6 or 7 years ago. Nothing major, but began looking for answers. One issue was low T, and therapy really didn't provide an answer, and in some cases (I am not one of the lucky guys who gets and injection and everything is great, I have to manage estrogen and DHT or its all for nothing) actually made it worse. My libido and energy improved, but the heightened libido actually made the problems worse in a way. And if I didn't manage everything well, I could indeed end up limp. But I would always spring back. I would go through periods where everything was great, then, a week of so-so erections. But not doing TRT, was also not an option. It affected the rest of my life, not just sex. So, TRT was in and I needed accommodate that.

So tried pills. Viagra just didn't do a thing and Cialis was not a guarantee. And as of this year, it pretty much wasn't doing the trick. Injections, well got two priapisms, one insanely good erection and a misses every other time, of the seven times I tried.

However, this really only came to a head in May of last year (2017), when i could honestly say it was not something I could live with. If i wasn't jacking off 2 or 3 times a day or having sex every other day, that was an off week. And I could not take the idea that I was losing some function. I suffered one of the priapisms and didn't just bounce back. Added to this was some bad TRT advice from a urologist and I kind of reached my end point.

So, I took two months, visited two doctors and talked to a shrink to make sure I was making the right decision. There was some scar tissue, but I had great blood flow (did a doppler) and during my implant surgery doctor noted this. Fact is I still had a lot of function, and could have waited. But like all the guys here, they wish they had done it earlier. I didn't want to lose size from waiting, and after the consultations and talking to guys on here, I knew that at some point, I was going to need this. The final question for me was, did I want to have as much size as possible, enhanced function and skip the downward spiral, or wait and see what might happen. I decided not to wait.

So what has happened. Five months from surgery, I maintained all of my length and I am thicker now. (I am not saying that will definitely happen, but my doctor advised me it might, and it has). Not sure there will be any increase in length, but I am only 5 months in and I will be honest, very happy with what I have. By not waiting, my arousal still starts naturally, and in fact the logistics of sex have stayed pretty much the same as before my implant. I pump in front of my partner or while I am doing other things (your mind in the gutter is appropriate here). Sex is just better than before, I am always hard and in my case, the implant enhanced what I already had. I will say, at week 4 I wondered what the hell I had done, and worried about what people might think. All of that just fell away.

Now having said all this, I did try pills and injections. I however did not spend years on this. Pills were a once in a while, and at that know that Cialis was not more than an enhancement. My entire injection timeline was less than a year, and was not good. But the point was, I had some experience. If pills had proven incredibly effective, I would have stayed with that and not implanted. Injections, even if they worked every time is just not sustainable in my opinion. Aside from being incredibly difficult if you are single or otherwise spontaneous, they do do damage potentially, so that was never an option in my book.

My final point is, you do not have to wait until you are literally failing at every attempt to have sex. You do not have to go through years of diminishing function and have tried and finally failed at all other options. As you have noted, a lot of guys wished they had done it earlier. It wasn't that they couldn't, they just had concerns that kept them from doing it. (I should note, some do have insurance issues that do delay them or have trouble finding the right surgeon). You DO have to have evaluated the other options though, because even though I am incredibly happy with my result, it is a huge and irreversible step. It is surgery, and that should never be taken lightly. I was having a lot of great sex until May of 2017. By August of 2017 I was implanted. I am 54, and will likely need a revision at some point (man, they really do need to do something a bit more 21st century with the pump, hoping that will be improved next time around). I hope that helped. A good surgeon is absolutely key. And so is talking with some of the guys on here. I got a show and tell and talked to at least 4 other guys who went though it.

[radioradio]

Nocturne,
I'm not a doc, so this is not medical advice. Life is way to short in general and tends to provide decreasing pleasure as we enter the latter stages. Given your overall health status and your wife's libido, I say do whatever you can do, however you have to do it to be happy together and to enjoy each other in every way possible, and waste no time doing it.
In my view of the world, no one is obligated to suffer ED. Get it fixed and rock on.
Bob

[FreddyFree]

I have a consultation in April. If I get refused, I will probably give a shotgun a blowjob.

I’ve had enough of the depression.

[DaveKell]

I have a consultation in April. If I get refused, I will probably give a shotgun a blowjob.

I’ve had enough of the depression.

I hope you don't have kids. My father committed suicide at the age of 42 a few months before Elvis died at the same age. Every year I'm reminded of how long it's been when the latest anniversary of Elvis' passing is announced. The thing is, all of us kids ended up hating him for offing himself. It was self indulgent to the extreme. You are obviously obsessing over your health issues. After 18 major surgeries, I've been there myself. But what if none of it does you in? It didn't do me in and I should've died an excruciatingly painful death twice now. You are magnifying this in your mind which is a normal thing that happens. It's like you constantly affirm it so it is your reality. Start denying it and rob of of its power over you. Look forward instead to better things and outcomes. Hell, it might be what actually happens for you. It's for damn sure a better outlook to have my friend. I know from firsthand experience.

[Anonymous3]

Granted we all think sex is great, but it is not so great to end a life. Yes ED fucks with us.
It is a demon and like all demonds we have the ability to fight and over come them. Look at all the other beautiful things you have. Watching a sunset wife your partnets is still romantic even if does not lead to sex. A simple I love you means alot