Hey everyone, hope you guys are doing better or making some progress.
Today is 2 months post-reversal and I don’t feel any better unfortunately. If anything, I might be just a bit worse.
I’ve been trying to live my life as normal as I possibly can, and staying off of here to help get my mind off of this helps my mental state a little bit. I used to think that the guys who left this place got better and moved on, but I think a lot of guys just don’t get better and try not to dwell on how their lives have changed.
My wife said it perfectly - that I’m grieving for the life I used to have. That couldn’t be more accurate for pretty much all of us here.
I guess you could say my pain changed a little bit post-reversal, for example ejaculation feels better and I don’t have an uptick in pain afterwards, if anything, it’s a pain reliever to do it twice a day, but that’s not very practical.
I saw Dr. Jarvi a couple weeks ago and he wasn’t very hopeful about me getting improvement from the reversal. He says it’s 3 months post-reversal where the pain relief peaks, and if I was going to benefit from it, I would have by now.
That comment kind of struck me as strange, since a lot of guys here say 6 months, 12 months or even longer, but I don’t know what to think anymore.
We talked for a while about denervation, removal, nerve blocks etc. I asked why denervation success rates vs what we see on this forum don’t add up and he said something to the effect of 85% being ‘creative writing’ and that denervation is closer to 70% for improvement, but follow ups are short term only and the pain may return as nerves regrow etc. He also said he’s done denervation on both sides, it works on one side and does nothing on the other and they just don’t know why. His thinking is that reversals are way more successful and safer than denervation.
Which brings me to my next point, he offered the option of inguinal removal too and they have very high success rates with it, but of course there’s no going back and I’ll possibly need T therapy. I also have a lot of cord and abdominal pain and removal might not even help that. Just imagine having an empty sac and still being in pain. That scares the hell out of me. If it was guaranteed to fix me, I’d do it tomorrow, but it’s another roll of the dice.
So at the present time, he prescribed flomax to help relax my pelvic floor (which it does) but it has disturbing side effects (dry orgasm, peeing semen, ED) and he also wants me to restart nortriptyline to see if it helps.
I start pelvic floor PT in a couple weeks and I go back to see Jarvi in January for nerve blocks and see what’s what.
I’m leaning towards removing my bad side and denervation on the not as bad side. I know denervation is not popular here, but I talked to one of Dr. Jarvi’s patients last week who had the exact same thing done and he had a great result and is doing really well. Maybe it could work for me too. Who knows.
Thanks for listening everyone.