Postby Lost Sheep » Wed Feb 05, 2020 12:05 pm
Welcome to FrankTalk, E.
I emailed back and forth with both Dr. Eid and Dr. Kramer. They were both very generous, kind and helpful. Dr. Eid wrote this piece of advice, "Find a surgeon in love with his craft." He went on to explain that such a surgeon will put his patients' outcome above all else.
Having said that, the surgeon I chose also told me, if you go to the East Coast, "you will be overflying a lot of good surgeons". I interviewed a couple good local surgeons and found Dr. Shaw (figuratively and almost, literally, "fell into my lap", but how that happened is another story). I liked him immediately and trusted him as he trusted me. He acknowledged the fact that I had researched extensively and treated me as a member of my medical care team, answered questions and shared his decision-making process.
When I first joined FrankTalk, I took a couple weekends to read through two and a half years of posts/threads with titles that interested me and appeared informative. I recommend this to you. It will give you a better basis for forming questions and understanding the answers. This will also help get your medical team to accept you as a contributing partner in the decision-making.
I also recommend doing extensive research on your chosen urologist/sexual health physician and interview him (or her) pointedly and make yourself an integral part of the medical team. (Of course, many men choose not to do that and I cannot fault them - just do what is comfortable for your personality and approach to your medical care.)
I recommend documenting your size (length and girth) by careful measurement and photographs. Make sure your measurement protocol is repeatable (you will want to measure after surgery also). The most widely used measurement is to press a measuring tool against your pubic bone just above your penis, compressing the pubic fat pad as much as possible and measuring (straight) to the tip of your penis (not following the curve around to the tip, but just straight out like a shoe store measures your foot to the tip of your toe - but you can follow the curve of your penis' shaft.) Girth is measurement of circumference at the midpoint of your penis. Some choose to find the girthiest part, instead. Usually the two points are the same or very close.
Size loss is not particularly common. But V.E.D. Therapy is helpful in maintaining size.
As far as measurements of length for the implant size are concerned, all the pre-op measurements are nonsense at worst and a fair estimate at best. The ONLY measurement that counts is the measurement INSIDE the tunica inside your penis. (My advice about research includes viewing youtube videos of the operations. There are plenty. The measurement of the penis is done with a tool stuck up inside the penis and pushed (rammed, it seems) quite energetically up, stretching the penis, and then turned around and inserted firmly into the pelvic crus. The two measurements are added together and that is the size of the implant.) Every man's depth of crus is unique to that man. Depends on the shape of your pelvic girdle mostly. A good surgeon with an experienced eye can tell pretty closely, but if a surgeon tells you he will use a certain size implant, beware. However, if a surgeon tells you he will keep your current size (and how he/she will do that) be good with that.
Lost Sheep
AMS LGX 18+3 Nov 6, 2017
Prostate Cancer 2023
READ OLD THREADS-ask better questions -better understand answers
Be part of your medical team
Document pre-op size-photos and written records
Pre-op VED therapy helps. Post-op is another matter
, however I get the last laugh having a younger female urologist 
.