More Some Side Effects of Prostate Radiation that Oncologists Kind of Tell you About; or, The Four Horseman of the Sexual Apocalypse Part I

The Horseman of the Apocalypse- Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Convinced I was going to have to deal with hot flashes as long as necessary I’ll move on to Low Libido, ED, penile atrophy, and performance anxiety...the Four Horsemen of the Sexual Apocalypse.  I’ve been a sexually active cowboy all my life.  That’s not to say I wasn’t selective (I was), but in the crassest of terms, I fucked a lot, so when the day came (and it came on suddenly) at which time I became about as interested in having sex as I was in watching the National Dog Show, I knew I was royally fucked and for how long I didn’t know or did the experts.  The systemic urge to have sex, even talk about having sex, was totally MIA.  Of course, my ex-partner was initially understanding, but the phrase many supportive partners say, “it’s all right if you can’t get it up” was the last phrase any sexually active man wanted to hear from anyone because it’s the equivalent of being remanded to prison.  Seemingly, one has no control over it, there’s no negotiation between man and penis at that point.  No sex, not even a whisper of sex, not even a reminder of sex, not even a hint of sex, a sniff of sex could increase my desire.  It was beyond my control, I couldn’t demand an erection, couldn’t even fantasize about having one.  The pills (Sildenafil, Cialis) were iffy.  In the past, sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t, which only exacerbated my performance anxiety as I asked the question to myself: “Is this fucking thing going to work or not?”  The days of one’s penis being “on call” were done, over, finished, kaput and the docs really had no definitive answers.  Libido might come back, they said, but it might not.  Time will tell.  Let’s see what happens.  Use whatever cliché you like, it all amounted to the same thing: a crap shoot.  It reminded me of a line the late, great American screenwriter wrote in his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, about who knows what in Hollywood, which he summed up by writing, “No one knows anything.”  Welcome to the world of potential impotence.