We need to talk about sex.
That’s never easy, but this is an emergency:
A professor and long-time PC patient I’ve spoken to who is familiar with research about sex and prostate cancer told me that *50% of the time* couples will incur serious damage to their marriag after the man has had treatment for PC. I have to caution you that this statistic may apply only to hormone therapy, but either way, it looks bad.
So I hope we can have a prolonged conversation about sex after PC. I’d like to discuss it from a woman’s point of view. And I’m going to start at the very beginning: How does sex work?
My new maxim is:
*Behind every successful man with PC is a woman who does the research.*
I know some guy won’t like that, but too bad. In our case, my first job after dear husband’s surgery was to figure out what caused ED. And that nearly drove me crazy.
As an urban woman who has no car, no lawnmower, sprinkler or garden hose, and no knowledge of plumbing or hydraulics, I felt lost. Because this is the way men talk about their bodies.
Scardino was my first read. He declares in “The Prostate Book”:
“The penis is a marvel of mechanical engineering.”
Too bad for me. I’m not mechanical. Nor visual. I’m a left-brainer with two left hands. Just so you know I have finished college, law school and passed the bar, but learning the mechanics of the lower half of the male body was the most difficult intellectual challenge I’d every faced
I remember sitting in Barnes & Noble for a couple of hours staring at the male genitalia in the “Atlas of the Human Body.” I couldn’t even tell whether the page was right-side up! And everybody around me thought I must be some kind of pervert.
Then there was the diagram in “The Prostate Book” of how an erection works. I looked blankly at the page for what seemed like an eternity. Then Ted came to the rescue.
Scardino explained that an erection is a sort of “valve.” Of course, I knew a valve is a pipe, but I didn’t know it’s a pipe with a stopper at one end. I had to look it up in the dictionary. Th