Yet Another Journal

[Discovernew]

You look amazing. May i ask whats your size? Bone pressed

Thank you! Haven’t measured my length in a long time, but was about 7” x 5.7” after the surgery. The girth slowly increased to 6”. No point in measuring myself now; the device is kaput and can’t be inflated. Eagerly (and just slightly nervously) looking forward to my revision surgery next week.

Did you keep all your same size from before the surgery or did you lose some after the implant?

[NYCGay]

Did you keep all your same size from before the surgery or did you lose some after the implant?

I didn't lose any length, but I lost a full inch in girth, from 6.7" to 5.7". Later, my girth slowly increased and was 6" at the time of my implant failure two months ago.

I didn't really mind losing that girth. My pre-op dick had kind of a weird shape, with the shaft bulging out on one side, which gave me all that extra girth. Post-op, that bulge was largely gone.

But there is another aspect of the shape of my post-op dick that I'm not crazy about: the shaft is now flat rather than round. It's like two cylinders pressed together and wrapped in skin (which is pretty much what it is). My old dick felt rounder in my hand. I would have preferred keeping that roundness, but I've been happy to give it up in exchange for being able to get hard.

You can see pics of the shape of my dick in my journal:
Pre-op: https://www.franktalk.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16918&start=90
Post-op: https://www.franktalk.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16918&start=180

[NYCGay]

1 week till replacement surgery

So now there are only seven days to go before I will lie down on the operation table, so that Dr. Eid can cut me open again, remove my failed implant and put in a new one. (This time, I’m going with the Titan with the Classic pump, which he says has proven much more durable than the Titan OTR I have now.)

I’m still trying to figure out, at least roughly, how much this is going to cost me. It’s starting to come into focus:

• Dr. Eid’s fee I will have to pay entirely out of pocket, since he’s not in-network with my current insurance.
• The device itself (which at a hefty $9,500 is the biggest line item) should be covered by Coloplast’s lifetime warranty. I will still have to pay for it upfront, but should get reimbursed once Coloplast has examined the explanted device. (I hope there is no hidden catch.)
• Hospital fees and anesthesiologist: Unclear. My insurance company Cigna says both that they will cover it and that they won’t, but refuses to give me either statement in writing. To protect myself against against surprises, I will have to pay out of pocket and self-submit a claim after the procedure. If I’m lucky, they’ll pay something.

I’m eagerly looking forward to the surgery – but now that it’s so close, I also feel apprehensive. I know that Dr. Eid is a leading expert in the field, with a remarkably low rate of infections, but still: there is always a risk, and just because things went well the first time around is of course no guarantee that they will go well this time too.

And even if everything goes well, there is still the recovery period to get through. Recovery after revision is supposed to be easier than the recovery after the original surgery – but just how much easier?

Dr. Eid’s Nurse Practitioner Timothy prescribed three different kinds of pain-killers for me, including OxyCodone. The pharmacy balked at filling prescriptions for two controlled pain-killers at the same time, but Timothy said it would be good for me to have them at hand and called the pharmacy and got them to approve it. Clearly, some level of pain is to be expected.

I don’t mean to scare anyone off from getting an implant; I didn’t have any severe pain after my original implant surgery, but there was a lot of discomfort, and for the first couple of weeks, life pretty much circled around my recovery. (I was working, but from home.) It was difficult, or often impossible to find a comfortable position for my dick. I remember sitting in bed, working on my laptop, naked from the waist down, with a heat pad over my dick.

Then there were the twice-daily hot baths that Dr. Eid recommends you to take while cycling the device, which he famously tells you to start doing very early: on the third day after the surgery, you unwrap the dressing, revealing your new implanted cock (which may be a bit bruised), pull out the catheter, take a percocet, lie down in hot, hot water, and pump up the device as hard as you can bear. (The heat made me dizzy, so I ended up putting and ice bag on top of my head: cool head, hot dick.)

I do remember those cycling sessions as being rather painful, but handling pain is so much easier when you have control over it: as soon as I deflated, the pain would subside, and knowing that, I could make myself stand it one more minute, and then another one, and then one more ...

I’m so eager to see my dick hard again, even if it hurts, so it was a bit of a disappointment to read Dr. Eid’s instructions and discover that they are different for replacement surgery: the hot baths are still there, but no cycling before the follow up visit two weeks after the surgery. I will adhere to whatever Dr. Eid says, but I will ask him if I can’t pump it up – just once – to check that everything works and see how it looks. Hey, I miss my hard-on; it would feel so good to say hello to it again.

In a bit of bad timing, I have family from overseas coming to visit me and my husband in our New York apartment over the holidays – family with whom I will not discuss my penile implant. They are arriving just six days after my surgery. Certainly not ideal timing, but I don’t want to put the surgery off. I will just have to make it work. I will need an excuse to explain all those hot baths and why I can’t go to the gym, and why I might need to go and lie down sometimes. I plan to say that I’ve had a procedure to shrink my enlarged prostate (which in reality I’m going to have later this winter). It should sound reasonable enough.

Just so there is no misunderstanding: regardless of any apprehension I might feel about the surgery, the recovery, and how to deal with my family visit, I’m very much looking forward to doing this. I want to have a functioning implant again.