A woman to love me

In March of 2002, I underwent surgery for removal of my cancerous prostate. The cancer was very small (PSA of 4.3) and the surgery was successful.

The surgery was “nerve-sparing,” meaning the surgeon was able to take the prostate without damage to the nerve bundles that enable erection.

But for several months after the surgery, I had no sexual function at all, partly as a reality of recovering from surgery, and partly because the nerves, though intact, were aggravated during the process, and aggravated nerves take time to recover. For several weeks during that period, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I was also incontinent. I was going through a big bag of Kotex pads every week and four incontinence bed pads every night.

I thought: “No woman is ever going to want to have anything to do with me.” I was 59 years old, alone, after my wife’s death from breast cancer in 2000 – what interesting years those were – I couldn’t get it up, I wet the bed all night, and I never knew during the day when I was going to spring a leak. Nope, I was going to go through the rest of my life alone, leaving a little trail, like a snail.

But I was wrong, and it is important that men coming out of prostate surgery know this. Many men – most of us, probably – go through life believing that women want the same things from sex that we do. But they don’t. Guys, we admire our equipment a lot more than they do, even when we are healthy, virile stallions of 35 or 40. Sex for most women does not begin and end with adoration of a man’s crotch.

Nor can situations like impotence and incontinence get in the way of a woman’s love for you, if she loves you. I knew good friends, a married couple, and more than once, as I saw them socially, they told me the real score. He is a year older than I am, a colon cancer survivor, surgery more than 30 years ago that left him with a colostomy. Radiation at that time created scar tissue that in the last five years has confounded his life and threatened his health in ways that truly should not happen to a human being.

He has tubes coming out of him indefinitely, but he has his strength back, and his life is full. He and his wife, one of the most beautiful, vibrant and professional women I ever knew, invited me more than once to dinner in those Christmas season days of 2002 and sat at their table and told me how much they loved each other, and she told me how she loved him, and how much a woman could find to love in a man like me. They told me how much I, as a man, had to look forward to when I met the woman who would love me.

In January, 2003, I began regular procedures called cystoscopies that gave me my continence back. Slowly my spared nerves regained enough tingle to convince me to get a prescription for Viagra. I picked up that first prescription of eight pills, and the pharmacist said, “That will be $38.” Thirty-eight dollars! I pulled out my credit card, gave it to her, and silently laughed at the circumstances of a man, leaning against the counter, who still had Kotex in his glovebox just in case and for the rest of his life would be paying more than four dollars to get a hard-on.

In September, 2004, I met the woman who would love me. She is 54, smart as a whip, and beautiful. We are engaged to be married Dec. 3. We are living in sin in the meantime and having more fun than should be legal. She has women friends who tell her about men friends who have had prostate surgery and walk around looking so confused and sad. I remember that sadness, and what caused it, and I was wrong. It’s the man a woman loves, not his equipment, and with that, the two of you will always go all the way.

(This blog will be archived in the Back Booth under "Her Cancer and Mine.")