HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

My implant is 2 years old today.

Happy Birthday to my AMS LGX 700 and may there be many more!!

Going back a few years

As you already know my way of dealing with and getting though this journey I have been on is to write things down.  Once it’s on paper, it’s out of my head.

Along with letting you know how I’m doing with my implant I thought I would give you an idea of what got me to this point.

I started writing it a couple of days after I came out of hospital but it begins the morning after my Open Radical Prostatectomy:-

I woke up after surgery (Monday early evening I think) felt OK – no pain, it must be the morphine, I had been told all I have to do is click a button and I get another hit and I MIGHT ADD it’s some good stuff!  I had a quick look and feel and although I couldn’t see much but I could see and feel that most iThe other day I found the hand written book I wrote around the time of my prostate surgery.  Difficult to read now but it does show me how far I have come.

mportantly my penis and testicles were still there (don’t ask – my head was all over the place) the plaster covering where I had the surgery went from my naval to where my penis meets my stomach – in my case that’s going to be some scar.

(I don’t know if I have ever mentioned what criteria I used to choose the surgeon/surgery route that I did.  Apart from the surgeon being the first person I spoke to and the fact that I wanted the cancer gone out of my body as soon as possible – it was his long fingers – I figured with fingers like that he could get to everywhere he needed to easily - I’m a very simple man).

At this point I should also mention that long fingers might make in my opinion a good surgeon they do not however make a good barber!!  Whoever shaved me prior to surgery was rubbish I seemed to have been left with a reverse Mohican. Then there was the catheter tube and by tube I mean hosepipe. How that went down the end of my willy I don’t know all I did know then was that it was big and it was going to be in there for a few weeks so I better get used to it.

Desperate to get home I was up and about on the Tuesday and off the morphine later the same day (one tube down).  I also had a visit from the surgeon who told me that the surgery had gone well and that the cancer appeared to have been contained within my prostate (though the cancer was bigger than they had thought – over half of my prostate had signs of cancer) but he was sure it had not spread to my lymph nodes either.  At the time I did not realise the significance of that comment – I do now though – contained and no spread was/is good.

The worst part of being in hospital was having the catheter bag emptied (apologies I hope you’re not reading this over breakfast, lunch etc.). It was emptied often day and night and the feeling was the strangest ever.  Nerves appeared to be jangling all over the place anyway and the slightest movement of the tube sent the oddest sensations down my willy, to my scrotum and to where I imagine my prostate had been.

Never told the nurses but who needs sex – just tweak my tube!!

I was in hospital for a total of 3 full days.  Everything I was told to do I did and I went home on the Wednesday.

One last thing before I let you get on:-

IN TWO DAYS TIME MY IMPLANT IS TWO YEARS OLD….

More soon.

Dave

2nd anniversary

My AMS LGX700 implant is almost 2!!!

I had my annual check at UCLH last Thursday and all is good and there are no sign of any erosion, infection or any other problems. The tips are in the perfect place and the pump is where it has always been making inflating and deflating easy (never thought I would say that).

It's all good.

Because my life is pretty busy I have got into a routine that works for me.  I wake early anyway and more or less as soon as I open my eyes while I am warm I inflate to the max.  It takes me about 30 squeezes of the bulb to inflate fully and even now I can still feel it stretch.  I leave it inflated while I get ready - about an hour or so then deflate, have a shower and I'm done.

When I inflated initially it took 10 squeezes and when I pushed the deflate button it buzzed for a count of 7 before I squeezed the shaft to deflate fully.  Now it is a count of 13 before I squeeze - just goes to show.

The doctor said that the tissue of my penis is still changing to accommodate my implant and that there is still potential for growth.

Happy days.

Dave