Profoundly ED

A follow up to a post I made earlier. After 5 months, my incontinence is much improved, down to one pad a day (24 hours), but I'm still profoundly ED. I've tried the big 3 pills, and nothing works. My DaVinci surgery was supposed to be nerve sparing. Been throwing around ideas.

Anyone try acupuncture?

Dan,
don't panic. 5 months is not the point to panic. Options are, in order of aggressiveness: Drungs: MUSE (a pill you put in the tip of the penis), TRIMIX GEL - a gel you squirt into the penis opening. Then injections.

Talk to your DR. He will probably try MUSE first. But you should probably be using injections. Remember, just cause he took out your prostate, doesn't mean he is the best guy to help you with recovery and rehab. Find a Doc who will aggressively help you. Ask him for injections.
Paul

If you are considering needles, do consider injections -- as James suggested, acupuncture of the penis. If you were getting good erections before surgery, there is an excellent chance that some form of injection will work for you.

Bimix and trimix are the cheapest, so I suggest start with those -- but be prepared for some failures at first. It took about 20 injections before I mastered the techniques and settled on a dosage.

Also don't rule out a VED -- again you will need some practice until you find what works for you.

Both injections and the VED work with the non-nerve-spared, so there is a good chance that one or both of those will work with you.

I tried Trimix for the first time last night. My doctor recommended that I start with .1 cc and increase it if that doesn't work. The .1 cc gave me half an erection but not enough for penetration. 20 minutes later I gave myself another .1 dosage and within 10 minutes I had a great erection and had intercourse for the first time since my surgery 3 months ago. My erection lasted 2 hours. The injection itself was painless. I had little to no discomfort.

According to this site

http://www.acupuncture.com/newsletters/m_nov05/main2.htm

they don't even put the needles into the penis when giving you acupuncture for ED. I haven't tried it for my ED (yet...) but my wife went to an acupuncturist last fall after 30 years of debilitating migraines. She was skeptical about acupuncture and had been seeing one of the top 3 headache neurologists in the region for a few years, who gave her meds that make her groggy and don't always work. After just three acupuncture sessions she was headache free for the first time in her adult life. She did a total of about 6 or 7 sessions at $70 apiece (by comparison her headache meds cost us almost two thousand a year with insurance).

hb2006 said...
I don't think MUSE is prescribed that much anymore. It doesn't have a high success rate, only works with 35% of those who try it. It didn't work for me and gave me the alprostadil pain.

The Trimix gel will probably work but is expensive and you can't reduce the dosage easy the way you can with Trimix vials. I would definitely ask your doctor for Trimix, or Caverject or Edex. All three will most likely give you an erection but the Caverject and Edex have the associated pain.

I'm on a Cialis/MUSE regimine and it's the same one my Urologist/Surgeon prescribes for most of his da Vinci patients because he says it shows the best results of the various treatments he's tried.  Each of us is different, though, and I recognize that what works for one of us isn't a guarantee it'll work for us all.   MUSE is widely used here in Chicago, though - according to what my pharmacist tells me.  I use the MUSE without side-effects, including pain of any sort.

My Urologist explained to me that most of his patients do not see much improvement with ED until after the one year or one and a half year post-op point.  I'm at the 7 month post-op point and last night, for the first time since the surgery, I achieved an erection about 90% of what I'd have had pre-op - after taking the Cialis/MUSE - and this happened quite suddenly and without manual stimulation.  Whether this is a "fluke" or a signal of better things to come . . . time will tell.  I've been taking the Cialis/MUSE about once a week - even though the Urologist prescribed it 3x/wk.  The Urologist has cautioned me, though, that I should observe the prescribed regimine because, he says, either you "use it" or you're going to "lose it" or lose hope of some sense of normalcy being achieved in the future.