In 2014 I was diagnosed with stage II prostate cancer. This was annoying as I had planned to live out my life cancer free. (This worked out about as well as my plans for marrying Raquel Welch.)
Fun Facts about prostate cancer:
- It’s one of the slowest growing cancers
- As only men have prostates, it’s not a concern for women (But ovarian cancer pretty much cancels out this benefit.)
The test for prostate cancer is call a PSA test. This is a blood test that determines the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) level. This antigen occurs normally in the bloodstream. Higher levels generally indicate some prostate issue, not necessarily cancer.
The first time my PSA level was high I elected to take immediate action: I changed doctors.
My new doctor didn’t believe in PSA tests. At the time there was a lot of discussion in medical circles about the high incidence of false positives. I naturally assumed it was a false positive. This belief would have continued if my new doctor hadn’t moved his practice. The new location was just too far so I went back to my old doctor.
Surprisingly, my high PSA scores were still high. My old doctor suggested I see a specialist.
So I go see the specialist. He is a very nice man with an impish smile and he really enjoyed hearing me jabber about my love of horror films. His examination and blood test confirmed that something was going on. The next step was a biopsy.
The easiest was to access the prostate is going up the ass. Sure, I could use “rectum” but that just sounds gross. (Don’t worry, we’ll get plenty of gross stuff on this journey.) In the image that’s the approach labelled “Trans-rectal needle”. That’s the one my doctor chose.
The process involves the doctor going up my ass several times. First with his finger to locate the bump inside my ass that is my prostate. Next was with a shot of local anesthetic. To clarify, the doctor shoved a special syringe up my ass and stuck it through the wall of my internal ass into my prostate.
This was not fun but it wasn’t terribly painful.
Once I my prostate was satisfactorily numbed he went up my ass with a needle gun to actually perform the biopsy. Only it wasn’t just one needle. The gun actually contains 14 needles. (Fun City!) This allowed the doctor to check 14 areas of my prostate.
He had warned me that the anesthetic wouldn’t completely numb my entire prostate; some of the needles might hurt a little.
At this stage in the story its useful to explain doctor terminology. Here’s a handy translation from doctor speak to real world speak.
| What the Doctor Says | What it actually means |
| “You might feel some pressure” | “This is going to hurt” |
| “You might feel some discomfort” | “HOLD ON TO YOUR ASS, PINOCCHIO, PAIN’S COMING TO TOWN ON A RADIOACTIVE FREIGHT TRAIN MADE OF SCORPION LAVA” |
So he goes up my ass with the needle gun. Fourteen needles through my ass wall into my prostate.
Fourteen.
The first ten didn’t hurt at all. I could feel the needles as they lanced through the succulent (don’t know if the prostate is actually succulent, it just sounds cool.) flesh of my ass wall and my prostate, but there was no pain.
And then there were needles eleven through fourteen.
Yes I did feel pressure but on needle eleven there was just a bit of pain. Enough to cause me to say “OH!” but not too bad.
Twelve was worse. MUCH more pain, causing me to say “OH, OH!” But I’m a tough guy so I got past it.
Thirteen was like someone took a very hot needle and shoved it up my ass, into my (now angry) prostate. I honestly don’t remember what I said here, but the doctor did leave the room for a minute.
Once the screaming stopped (my memory is vague at this point.) he came back in for needle fourteen.
The last one. (Thank freaking god!)
Also the most painful one. Maybe the anesthetic had worn off or never got to this part of the prostate.
This was full on, radioactive, white-hot, barbed-wire drill bit up my ass and into my now fully raging prostate.
I’m really struggling to find the words that can accurately describe the pain. Imagine the emotional pain you would feel if Trump was immortal and was elected President for life.
Imagine how life destroying that would feel.
Now convert that soul crushing emotional pain to physical pain, up your ass and into your insides.
This would be almost the brain exploding pain of the needle fourteen.
But at least it was over.
For now.
It would be a week before the results came back. During that week my wife and I had sex. It was uneventful except there was blood. My wife said she must have started her period.
That was not the case. Priming my pump solo confirmed that the blood wasn’t menstrual blood. It was my cum. (Or ejaculation issue if you prefer) My cum was now blood. Red, Red blood.
But that only lasted for a week of so. After that time, my cum was black as pitch. Wanking off should be a pleasurable release. This wasn’t that. There was no pain. The actual feeling of wanking or sexing was same as before. Except my cum was the color of Satan’s cum. Fun stuff.
A week goes by. The doctor’s office was supposed to call on Wednesday to give me the results. Wednesday came and went with no call. I took this as confirmation that my prostate might be filled with Satan’s cum but not cancer.
I called the doctor’s office on Thursday. The nice lady checked my results. This is that conversation, as well as I can remember:
Nice Lady: “Your results show cancer in eleven of the biopsy samples.” (Her tone was that of someone telling you you have something green in your teeth. There was zero alarm, just conveying somewhat relevant information.)
Me: (After a few seconds silence) So I have cancer.
Nice Lady: Oh, yes you have cancer. (No change in her tone.)
I get this. She makes many of these calls every day. Nothing new to her. Just information to convey.
I still remember just how unreal that call seemed. But it was real and now I had to deal with it. The nice lady set up an appointment with the doctor for my wife and me.
By the time of the appointment my shock and awe had been replaced with the grim reality that I’d be going under the knife in a big way or maybe have deadly radiation blasted into the area of my body that was fairly important.
The doctor wasn’t grim. He outlined exactly how advanced my cancer was and what the options were. There are generally three options for prostate cancer treatment:
- Surgical removal of the naughty prostate
- Using radiation to kill the naughty prostate
- Waiting
As prostate cancer grows very slowly (generally) if it’s detected early, (stage I) waiting can be a viable option. The idea is that treatment is always advancing and a new, less invasive and less destructive option might become available.
My cancer was stage II so waiting was off the table. So surgery or radiation were the options available to me.
The thing I love about this doctor is that he’s a non-bullshit kinda guy. He calmly explained that radiation and surgery would probably have the same result: no natural erections for the rest of my life and the potential for some incontinence. The plus on radiation was no surgery. Just the fun effects from having several blasts of radiation in my crotch. The plus on surgery was one and done and no radiation and it’s fun side effects.
We chose surgery as I’d had major surgery before and knew how to recover from it. Radiation scared the living crap out of me.
Once the choice was made the doctor set up an appointment for the surgery. As our hefty insurance deductible had already been covered for 2014 (Earlier that year I had been diagnosed and treated for a cataract in my left eye.) we only had to make sure the hospital had the correct insurance information.
So there I was, sitting in front on a very nice man. He took my information, punched a few keyboard keys, squinted at the screen for a moment and then turned to me with a smile, saying: “We have your information. Looks like your part of the surgery will be $25,000.”
The loud, somewhat incoherent laughter I was hearing was my own. “I don’t have that kind of money.” were the words I heard my self say through the laughs. The very nice man’s face went a little pale. He looked at the screen and relayed the information he had. Turns out the insurance info was years old and didn’t reflect our current coverage. Once that was worked out everything fell in place and we were ready to go.
Christmas Day 2014: We were having one of my wife’s old friends over and I was busy preparing a feast. The menu was smoked prime rib, Romanov potatoes, rolls, and other crap I can’t remember. It all came out very well and everyone had a sumptuous meal and by everyone I mean everyone but me.
As my surgery was early the next morning I had to stop eating at noon. Fun Stuff.
Day 1: Surgery Day
The day came. We went to the hospital and went through the different steps of preparing for surgery. The only thing I remember was that everyone was very nice and actually seemed to enjoy my stupid nervous jokes (much as I hope you’re doing now). The surgery proceeded without issue and everything looked very good.
Before the surgery my doctor had said it’s possible that I could be released the day after surgery. I was planning on that as I absolutely hate being in the hospital (big surprise) for all the usual reasons but mostly because I am unable to sleep (without chemical aid) in a hospital. On the plus side I had a morphine pump of which I had semi control over; semi because it was limited in how often I could use it. It would allow me a pleasing wave of opioid bliss and relief every eight minutes which meant I was hitting that sucker every eight minutes I was awake which pretty much my entire stay.
The night came and as tired as I was, sleep was not on my dance card. I thought the morphine might help. Nope. Sleepless night #1
Day 2: “I thought I was going home today?”
Day two was much like Day one (minus the surgery). I was getting my food via tube which makes it fairly difficult to enjoy. I had a catheter feeding in to a lovely plastic gallon bag nest to my bed.
Here’s a clinical definition of a urinary catheter for those of you lucky enough to have never had the pleasure: “A thin, flexible tube inserted into the bladder to drain urine when a person is unable to urinate independently.”
Sounds pretty benign. But below the pleasant medical jargon is the disgusting and uncomfortable reality of having a tube shoved up your dick. This wasn’t my first experience with this medically approved torture device. I accidentally shot myself (story upcoming in a future post) just before my senior year in high school. For some reason during my hospital recovery my bladder decided it was time for a break; a days-long break. This was not a good time. You just haven’t lived till you’ve had the disgustingly uncomfortable experience of being so full of pee that you expected it to begin seeping from every open place on your body – except your dick.
The med tech that helped me out (if having someone shove a plastic tube down your dick hole into god knows where inside your body is “helping you out”) was a Vietnam vet and was actually very cool and sensitive to me being a bloated, scared baby man who absolutely did NOT want a plastic tube shoved up my dick hole. When he came into to abuse me in this horrifyingly intimate way he understood that I might not be thrilled about it. But with great care and a gentle touch to my manhood, he got me through it.
Hilarious and Terrifying Anecdotal Side Bar
Bizarre Sex Kink Gone Wrong: Story 1
At one of the 13,895 jobs I’d had a co-worker told me two stories his emergency room doctor brother had told him WARNING: This isn’t going to be pretty.
One night a guy came into the er with some bladder pain. He pulls down his pants and the doc sees something he’s never seen before: a rather long length of black plastic electrical cord coming out of the end of the patients dick. (It gets worse, much much worse) The solution seemed pretty simple: What goes in, must come out. Easy.
Except the cord WOULD NOT BUDGE. And any time the doc tried to budge it, the patient transformed from a naked scared man into a human screaming machine.
Turns out, this guy’s kink was to take a fairly long length of black plastic electrical cord (without the plug thankfully) and catheterize HIMSELF. (Yeah, I get that when you take sex, human desire, and the infinitely bizarre world of human kink, you find some stuff for which the only appropriate response is WHAT THE ACTUAL LIVING FUCK?!!)
The details: The guy would take the black plastic cord and carefully feed it inside his dick hole. It was long enough so that some of it would end up inside his bladder. Then while still riding the ecstatic kink sex high he would gently pull the cord out. He’d been doing this for a long time without issue.
Not this time.
This time something new and TERRIFYING happened; towards the end of the cord, it stopped coming out and HURT when he tried to proceed.
An x-ray told the horrifying, disgusting and brain exploding story; the black plastic cord had somehow coiled into a knot. (Please feel free to stop reading at this point for the appropriate scream break.)
I would like nothing more that to tell you how the doc ended up getting the knot out, but I don’t know, because my response to hearing about the knot caused me to put my hands over my ears, close my eyes, and scream “NO NO NO NO NO OH MY FUCKING GOD NO!” for a long time.
Bizarre Sex Kink Gone Wrong: Story 2
Another time in the er a guy (why is it always MEN who do this crazy shit?) came in complaining of stomach pain and days long constipation. Again, an X-ray told the story (or part of it). It showed several oddly shaped objects in the guys stomach. The objects were oblong, about two inches long with a short inch long tube protruding from one end. The doc asked the patient if he had any idea what those objects might be. And then came the rest of the story.
This guy’s kink was to bite off the head of a Barbie (Sorry Mattel) as he whacked off and swallow it as he came.
This is not a joke. And the really bizarre thing is that this is apparently a VERY common kink.
There are times when I think the universe created humans as an experiment to see just how fucked up supposedly intelligent animals can get.
We are the result.
You’re welcome universe, hope you’re enjoying the show.
Day 3: “You want me to do WHAT?”
Here’s something you might not know about hospitals in the great USA; they are apparently staffed entirely by doctors, nurses, non-doctors, and non-nurses who share several curious tendencies:
- They are, by all appearances, regular people.
- They appear to be very kind and considerate.
- They are in fact sadistic to the point that it would make the Marquis de Sade scream “HAVE YOU NO COMPASSION AT ALL?
The impossible thing they wanted me to do was get out of bed and walk around while dragging my piss bag (containing a really lovely mix of unhealthy looking piss, blood, and crap I’ve never been able to identify, not that I wanted to)
So, with help, I got out of bed on my VERY shaky legs and slowly shuffled down the hall and back. You might think I was self conscious, but the universe was kind enough so that there were a lots of people shuffling around the halls dragging piss bags containing various fluids of disgusting nature.
My understanding was that I’d be going home today so I was waiting for someone to confirm that.
Nope.
Turns out when you have everything related to your urinary track cut apart and rudely patched back together, your body needs to do one very specific thing to prove that your insides have been correctly re-plumbed. Apparently having shit come out your dick and piss coming out your ass isn’t considered an upgrade.
So everyone in the hospital was waiting for me to fart.
Everyone.
And that gas just wasn’t budging from my ass.
Day 4: No Farts, No Joy, No going home
The good news was that except for feeling like there was an over inflated basketball in my gut, I felt pretty good.
Getting up and walking was easier and I could see the end of the tunnel.
Just waiting on the fart.
Day 5: On Frustration, Food, And The Most Enjoyable Fart A Person Could Ever Have.
Most things were much better. Getting up and walking around felt almost normal (except for dragging the piss bag) The good news is the piss bag fluid looked less like liquid afterbirth and more like regular yellow piss. (Small favors)
But I was still in the no-fart zone. My lovely wife and I discussed this issue and came up with a cunning and bold plan: we asked for a tuna salad sandwich. (Up to then I’d still been getting nutrients from the tube in my arm.)
Surprisingly, they said yes and a tuna salad on whole wheat came to my room, delivered by a dancing group of smoking hot nurses in black bondage gear. (That part is fiction but I really like that image.)
I ate the sandwich. It was the best thing I had eaten in my life up to that point.
And not long after that I visited the bathroom, my bowels opened delivering the longest and most satisfying fart\shit I’ve ever had. (It was one of the ten best memories I have.)
Everyone was happy (except the people in hazmat suits tasked with cleaning the bathroom.) Very soon I was discharged and went home to continue my recovery.
Epilogue
The rest of my recovery was uneventful and soon I was my normal sarcastic and cynical self.
With some big life changes:
My wonderful (and I mean that truly and sincerely. He’s the greatest medical professional I’ve ever had the pleasure to have inside my guts.) had warned me that getting erections would be problematic. The good news (and I didn’t know this so it was a very pleasant surprise) was the erectile dysfunction meds work just as well for missing prostrate guys as they do physically complete models.
So I could pop the pill and ride the orgasm express with my lovely and supportive wife just as before.
Sort of
The prostate produces semen that is mixed with sperm and ejaculated by a specific muscle. Here’s the clinical explanation:
Bulbospongiosus Muscle:
Situated in the midline of the perineum, the bulbospongiosus muscle surrounds the bulb of the penis and the corpus spongiosum, the tissue that houses the urethra. This muscle is instrumental in ejaculation, as it contracts rhythmically to propel semen through the urethra. Additionally, it aids in emptying the urethra after urination by compressing the bulb of the penis. The strength and coordination of the bulbospongiosus muscle are essential for effective ejaculation and urinary function.
The removal or destruction of the prostrate means the circuitry that causes those contractions to no longer function. Without semen or sperm your body has nothing to ejaculate, so it just doesn’t happen.
As it happens (to me at least) those contractions and the joyous tiny cannon explosion of ejaculation was gone, never to return.
I could still orgasm, in the clinical sense, but without the particular sensation of ejaculation, the experience was very different and fairly unsatisfying.
The was past this is to (by LOTS solo excursions and sex) basically re-learn how to enjoy the actual sensation of orgasm. Eventually it will get better in at least one way (no more need for tissues, towels, or socks [don’t judge me] soiled with man juice) That’s actually pretty cool.
The second big change is that the removal of the prostate means the patient will experience some incontinence. Instead of your pee waiting patently for you to hit the bathroom, it might just take the express train to your underwear.
Not fun.
But the solutions are many. Special underwear (call it what you want Casper, it’s a freaking diaper), pads of varying sizes with different levels of absorption (think drips and leaks to Niagra level protection)
You can also do the male version of a kegel by exercising your pelvic wall.
Funny story: I went a little overboard with this and had the blissful (that’s sarcasm Spanky) experience of getting a cramp in a place where you NEVER NEVER NEVER want to get a cramp. So I slowed down (stopped completely) with the kegels.
Twelve Years On
The biggest takeaway from this, and what I hope this way-too long text means is that getting prostrate cancer and dealing with it however you choose isn’t the life\sex ending experience some think it might be.
I’ve known men who seriously said they would rather die than lose the ability to rock a hard one and share their man juice in every way possible.
Guys, it’s a big deal health wise, but it not the end of the world.
JUST DON’T IGNORE IT, REALLY!
I say that will much emphasis because I did know one guy with this attitude that elected, against his doctors advise, to wait until that magical day when prostate cancer could be corrected with zero changes to his horizontal boogie ability.
And it killed him. No Fucking Shit.
Sorry to end on a downer but if you take one thing from this encyclopedia level textual ejaculation (Hey, if I can’t shoot cum, at least it hasn’t impeded my Cthulhu given ability to ejaculate bullshit!) get your PSA level checked regularly for your own good.
Final Thoughts
Two people made it possible for me to endure this journey with the bare minimum of mental and physical distress:
My Loving, Supporting, Sexy, Funny, Beautiful, (I would run out of superlatives before I effectively conveyed just how great she was and is) wife. She stuck with me through the entire process and gave me the courage to make it through. (Buying the sexy nurse bondage gear was a BIG plus!)
I would not have survived it, much less thrived without her infinite patience and support.
THANK YOU SO MUCH DONA!!! YOU ROCK MORE THAN ANYONE HAS EVER ROCKED ANYWHERE IN THE MULTIVERSE!
My AMAZING doctor and surgeon. He and his team were ALWAYS there to make this potentially terrifying journey manageable. I still see him every six months and we ALWAYS spend too much time talking about stupid shit, just like the two juvenile guys at heart, that we will be always.
Thank you Keith, you’re the best doctor\surgeon\oncologist anyone could ever hope for. The memory of your kind and caring smile, your impish laugh, and just the way you put me at ease beginning day one and continuing 12 years on, actually gives me hope for the black hole that is healthcare in the USA.
