Surgery and Sex, Getting Back To It

It can be espe­cially men­tal. When the surgery is per­formed directly on a part of the phys­i­cal sex sys­tem, when there is direct injury to sex­ual tis­sues, the men­tal aspect may even be a big­ger hur­dle to over­come. I can only speak about per­sonal expe­ri­ences from a male per­spec­tive, but I would sus­pect there are at least some sim­i­lar­i­ties to the female experience.

Imme­di­ately fol­low­ing surgery, sex is not really part of what dri­ves you. The dis­com­fort removes any phys­i­cal desire. I sup­pose some may have an emo­tional con­cern about the return of phys­i­cal capa­bil­ity, it is a small risk with surg­eries per­formed on areas of the body with such crit­i­cal neural path­ways. Per­son­ally, I will admit to a few moments of con­cern before my surgery. But, as has been true for all of my surg­eries, once the process started, I felt I was doing the right thing to fix a real issue and any risks were actu­ally quite small (it helps to have a good grasp of math­e­mat­ics when try­ing to over­come irra­tional fears by under­stand­ing actual probabilities).

Even once home and mov­ing around, with this par­tic­u­lar surgery hav­ing any real form of sex­ual inter­ac­tion with my life part­ner beyond a gen­tle touch on the hand was pretty far from my mind. The dis­com­fort was not really that bad as surg­eries go. At least so long as I did not sit for too long, or did not sit on a hard sur­face, did not bump into any­thing that jos­tled any part of my body any­where near my groin, and I specif­i­cally exclude all bod­ily func­tions related to the other pur­pose of the pri­mary exter­nal male sex organ from this dis­cus­sion. Those other bod­ily func­tions were quite inter­est­ing when clots plugged the catheter, which was in place in the hos­pi­tal. These func­tions remained inter­est­ing after release because of bruis­ing to my penis and ure­thral sphinc­ter from the sur­gi­cal instru­ment and the catheter. When it was time to go, it was time to go! But oh how I did not want to go! The pain could be intense for a short while. If I did not go right then the con­se­quence were very messy, but I knew what was com­ing. What a dilemma. But as with all surg­eries, this is just part of the recov­ery, it passes. After a while the clots and bleed­ing stop, Well actu­ally grad­u­ally slow down and then stop.

The sign things might be improv­ing came the night when instead of clots I passed scabs. Did I dare hope that the tis­sues had healed enough to seal off? After a cou­ple of days I was will­ing to think that the end might be in sight. I was still ten­der but not as much. Those other bod­ily func­tions were still occur­ring with urgency and dis­com­fort, but not as much. And thoughts and desires for the return of sex­ual activ­ity were cer­tainly increas­ing. But fear for the con­se­quences on the part of both myself and my life part­ner sup­pressed action from resum­ing our nor­mal activ­i­ties. Guid­ance from the doc­tors had been “use your best judg­ment”. In other words, “when you are ready, give it a try and if it does not hurt you are ready”. Sheesh, it takes a lot of desire to over­come being timid in the face of the pos­si­bil­ity of set­ting back recov­ery when you are finally mak­ing progress.

But finally the day comes when the desire for close­ness and let’s face it, sex, over­comes fear. Life starts to become whole again. The close­ness with your my life part­ner becomes whole again. Your really begin to feel that you not only will recover from the surgery, but that you just may in fact expe­ri­ence the “improved qual­ity of life” that both the sur­geon and you pri­mary care physi­cian talked about. For what it is worth, both of my doc­tors were focused on cor­rect­ing a prob­lem with a long-standing chronic infec­tion. Only very brief men­tion was made in pass­ing of sex­ual effects. Mostly dis­cus­sion of the extremely rare pos­si­bil­ity of neg­a­tive effects. Only one slight com­ment of the pos­si­bil­ity of improved func­tion. I am too much of a sci­en­tist to make a final con­clu­sion based on a few obser­va­tions, but both Still Here Too and I have observed the same recur­ring effect. Since the surgery and since over­com­ing the fear to resume sex­ual activ­ity, it cer­tainly seems that more than just the chronic infec­tion sit­u­a­tion has been improved.

Life works out some­times. But only when both your body and mind is ready.

Is Still Here