24 January 2014: Foreskin Restoration Before and After; The End(?)

It has been a long time since I have last posted.

More precisely, it has been 1 year, 9 months, and 24 days since I have last posted.

I've never been one to be content with leaving a project unfinished, so I suppose it is only fitting for me to put the final chapter of this tale in its place, and let the chips fall where they may.

Since that last post from 1 year, 9 months, and 24 days ago, much has happened in my life.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the new surgical scars felt discomfort when I got erections.  I hypothesized that the tightness of the skin on my penis during erections, and the stress on the new scars were responsible for the pins-and-needles sensations during erections.  I mentioned that I might try the process of foreskin restoration, at least partially, to try to get enough slack skin to remove the stress on these scars, and maybe even cover them up entirely.

Though I never overtly mentioned it on this blog before, in late December of 2011, I ordered a foreskin restoration device.  It arrived early in January of 2012.  Later in the month, when I was sure that the surgical wounds were healed and would not reopen, I began the long process of growing slack skin on my penile shaft.

I've been doing that now covertly, up until today.  It has been 2 years and 2 days since I have started the process, and it has been going well. 

Since I began, the changes that I saw in my penis have been gradual, but remarkable.  Dark scars that I thought would be with me forever have faded significantly, nearly disappearing entirely.  The glans of my penis no longer has the texture of the back of my hand with tiny raised bumps like a cat's tongue.  Instead, the glans now has a surface that resembles the inside of my cheek--smooth, moist, and shiny.

The surgical scars themselves have faded significantly, and are no longer visible unless I retract my newly regrown foreskin (or should I say "faux-skin?"), and look hard for them.  It is to the point, now, that whenever I go to the bathroom or disrobe for any reason, I no longer look down and am reminded by the scars of what happened, and what I have been through.

My penis after 2 years and 2 days of foreskin restoration.

My erections have been totally pain-free for more than a year, now.  There are no aches or sharp needle-like pain, and the scars from surgery give me no more discomfort.  My long and arduous quest to free myself from painful erections is now complete.

That being said, the cosmetic benefits are not all that I have gained from this process.

Prior to the erection pain beginning so many years ago, I remember what ejaculation felt like.  It was something that I certainly enjoyed, but was by no means phenomenal.  The first time I ever tried masturbating a couple of months after surgery, I remember so many feelings going through my head.  I was very anxious and afraid.  I wondered if masturbation would even work for me anymore.

It did end up working, but it was disappointing.  It ended with me looking down at my private parts and pulling my hands away because the glans stung (which was what it had been like in the past). I felt underwhelmed and practically bored by the whole experience.  I ejaculated and it felt OK, but it was disappointing.  I felt a pleasant contraction in my groin, and semen came out of my penis, but that was really all I got out of the experience.

I breathed a sigh of relief outwardly, that things were still working for me, but inwardly, I was disappointed.  I almost ended up saying aloud to myself "Now what," or "That's it?"

It was sometime after that experience that I began the process of foreskin restoration.

In about 8 months, I began to notice a difference in the way masturbation pleasure felt.  Around that time, I no longer touched my glans with my bare hand, but rather with what foreskin I had restored.  The inside of my new foreskin was now what remains of my formerly-inner-but-now-inner-once-more preputial mucosa.  I was masturbating by only manipulating the new loose skin back and forth over the glans and shaft of my penis.

The first time I tried that, the orgasm was a first among many.

Literally.

I think that was the first time I ever actually experienced an orgasm.   

A real one.

I remember what masturbation was like before the erection pain started.  It was similar to my first session after surgery--a lot of work for an underwhelming result.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it did feel good in my penis, but it felt like too little reward for the work I had to put into the process.

Fast forward to that first time I masturbated by moving my newly regrown simulacra of a foreskin up and down.  Something was fundamentally different, and I could feel it from the very moment I started.  If I had to describe the way in which it was different, masturbation no longer felt like a chore or a task, but rather a journey, with the destination being somewhere you actually wanted to be.

I don't know how long I went, but I knew that for the first time, I genuinely enjoyed every bit of it from start to finish.

By the time I was nearing climax, my body was acting in ways I had never experienced before.  My heart was pounding, and my chest felt tight like I had a catch in my throat.  My legs were shaking, and I was lightly perspiring.  My toes and feet were contracting and moving on their own.  My penis was producing a clear, lubricating fluid in quantities that I never even considered humanly possible.

Then, it happened.

Merely saying "I orgasmed" does not give the sensations their due justice.  With my entire body shaking, I climaxed for what I truly believe to be the first time in my entire life.  It was if every single neuron in my entire body was firing simultaneously--from the very apex of my scalp to the soles of my feet.  It was as if the pleasant-but-underwhelming sensations that I felt in my penis during the past 8 months of masturbation had been multiplied by a factor of at least 20, and instead of feeling these only in my penis, I felt them all over my body at the same time for a period of no fewer than 30 seconds.  Additionally the stinging that I used to feel in the glans after every time I masturbated was absent, and never came back. 

I no longer just ejaculated; I climaxed with my entire body

After that novel experience, my face and palms were tingling and my hands and thighs felt almost numb.  I lay back in my bed in the dark, panting, and felt an intense sensation of relaxation, warmth, and satisfaction all over my body.

I had never in my entire life ever experienced anything like that before.  Ever.

At that point, I will admit that I did cry a little bit, but not out of sadness.  I cried because of the erection pain being gone.  I cried because I felt like everything difficult I had ever lived through concerning my penis was done with and behind me.  I cried because, for me, this was a new first.  I cried because I felt relieved.

I cried because I felt like it.

To be honest, I think that was the first time I ever actually had a real orgasm.  At 22 years of age, it seems impossible for me to be discovering something so marvelous about my body at such a late age, but nonetheless, that was my genuine experience.

Although I can only guess, I think that what I was experiencing before was "just ejaculation."  It felt good for my penis, but only my penis.  It felt good, but it kind of left me disappointed.  That "real" orgasm, that very first one, was fundamentally different from anything I had ever felt previously in my entire life.

From that point on, I only masturbated by moving my growing proto-prepuce back and forth over my entire penis, and felt the novel new pleasure each and every time, with the intensity gradually increasing as I progressed with my restoration.

I don't have a scientific explanation of why things changed for me once I tried to start restoring my foreskin.  It did not and still does not make any sense to me.  It's damned near unscientific for the change to happen at all, and as a man of science, there could not be a word more insulting than "unscientific."

I know that the normal human foreskin contains thousands of touch receptors, and that nerves cannot regrow, in human physiology.  What I was experiencing was not the result of more nerve bandwidth to my penis and new foreskin, as such is (as we currently know) medically impossible to occur spontaneously.

My only working theory is that rubbing tissues that were supposed to be the inside of my foreskin against the glans, and stimulating the glans with what remained of my inner foreskin somehow ended up producing the resulting new sensations--that somehow, I changed the very mechanics of my penis works from merely a stick with skin tightly wrapped around it to a machine made of flesh with moving parts and a newly regained pistoning action.

I suspect that the texture changes in my glans, from being covered and moist all the time, in conjunction with the changing texture of my inner mucosa, and the change in mechanics of masturbation now involving rubbing these two surfaces against each other for pleasure, may all be partially responsible for these new changes I have been feeling.

It's kind of like when you fall asleep with your mouth open, and your tongue is dry and has the texture of sandpaper.  You can't really taste anything, or feel the inside of your mouth with your tongue again until it is moist and has lost its sandpapery texture.

Now imagine that drastic sensation change in your genitals instead of your mouth, and I think you might have the right idea.

Apart from that, I finally did take it upon myself to seek out a counselor, to talk about everything I had been through, and everything I had been feeling, from early childhood to surgery and beyond.  It was a rewarding experience.  I suppose that from the very beginning, all I really wanted was for someone to try to understand and validate my feelings with no conditions, and that was precisely what I got.

For all intents and purposes, my story here is over, though I still have a long time ahead of me, yet.  I may continue restoring a bit longer, just to make sure my penis can stay covered on its own in my underwear 100% of the time, from now on.

Maybe I'll go longer.  Who knows?  Perhaps I'll go for years and years, until I have enough foreskin to jump rope with. Who can say?

But now, with all things said that needed to be said, and with this chapter in my life at a close, I thank you for reading, and hope that however you stumbled across this tale, that you found what you were looking for.

Though my tale here is at an end, and I'm leaving this blog behind, putting "The END" at the end of this post seems a bit misleading, because I've got my whole life, yet, ahead of me.

So instead, I'll conclude with the following:

To be happily continued...

15 January 2012: Associative Trypanophobia and a Scar Update

There is an unusual aspect of my life that strikes me as odd, and it is my unusual simultaneously high and low tolerance to pain.

I have had my fair share of falls, tumbles, scrapes, cuts, a few gashes, and other accidents growing up, but none of that really seemed to phase me that much in terms of how painful they were.  For example, I once had someone playfully take a hard swing at me with a large icicle (don't ever do this, seriously), which didn't break, and thudded as it smacked me in the thigh.  This wasn't that bad, in terms of pain.

In spite of being able to take all of this, I have a terrible anxiety when there are needles involved.  I have as long as I have been able to remember been resentful of needles being inserted into my body, and literally started shaking the few times it has been necessary.  The pain of needles isn't really that bad, or sharp for that matter, but the psychological anticipation of the pain coming is what causes me to worry and shake.

For example, in a practice lab for class we once used disposable lancets to test our own blood glucose levels, but I could not bring myself to administer the sharp, sterile device to draw blood from my finger.  I had to hand someone else my lancet, and looked away.  I told my partner to pick a finger random, but not to tell me which one.  When my partner asked if I wanted him to countdown, I said no.  I felt that counting would have made it worse.  Someone sitting next to me was kind enough to distract me with an anecdote, but I still was shaking and jumped when I felt the sharp pain on my finger.

This shaking anxiety has always been in my life in response to anticipated physical pain.

I remember reading somewhere once a study about negative changes in infant and toddler pain thresholds or vaccination discomforts as correlated with circumcision status, and I can't help but wonder.  This fear and anxiety for anticipated pain has been around as long as I can remember.  My earliest memory of vaccination was an anxious one, even before the needle, and at the time I didn't know and couldn't remember why.  This was the first shot I would ever remember.  Why was I so frightened with no previous concrete negative memory before?

This might all seem speculative, because, well, for me it is.  Whether or not it is speculative, I think this is significant.

All speculation aside, I will conclusively state that taking two shots directly into my penis on the day of surgery certainly did nothing to improve my already present anxiety for needles.

In other news, there has been some mild improvement in the scars.

The fibroid fissure is now not a local, hard, raised, clearly defined lump under my skin anymore.  Now it is only a tough gristly area where I am guessing the collagen scar matrix is breaking down.

The fleshy crater is still a crater, and has surfaced over with gray, shiny scar tissue.  It appears to be filling in very, very slowly from the bottom.  I'll keep my fingers crossed that it continues.

3 December 2011: Three Weeks Later

The fibroid fissure has almost completely disappeared, but the raised area and the new scar are still tender to the touch and are still painful to manipulate.

The fleshy crater has almost completely filled in from the bottom, and there is now a scab there.

Nevertheless, I will still keep the areas protected by bandages and ointments until they are completely healed and no longer painful.

To the regiment of ointments I now employ, I will be adding topical vitamin E soon.  The penis is a terrible place to have scars, and it is said that vitamin E is a good substance for the reduction of scars.
 
In the same way that my wounds are now closing, I suppose I ought to begin putting down my closing thoughts on all of this.

In spite of the stress of all of this--the penile surgery while still conscious, the stitches, the blood, years of painful insomnia, denial from my parents that anything was remotely wrong and countless trivializations of the pain I was in--I feel that I have become a stronger person.

It has been more than a month, now, that I have been writing about this.  I had long had feelings buried deep inside about what was done to my body, and things have certainly gotten shaken up by my simply bringing this matter forward and talking/doing something about it, but this was all a necessary process for me to be able to live a better life.

I just wish I could stop thinking about it.

I have been on that operating table, conscious, and aware of the surgery going on, and I was in little pain at the time.  I already had hated needles before this.  The sensation of needles slowly entering the penis and injecting is not so easily forgotten, and I doubt I ever will be able to forget that sensation.  I still wake up to reliving that moment in my nightmares.  Even while mostly numbed, it was by far the most stressful moment of my entire life within recollection.  The mere knowledge that someone I had barely met was cutting off a part of my penis was overwhelmingly panic-inducing for me.

I am a student going into a health-related career.  I have seen disturbing medical events, fresh burn victims, purulent cases of road-rash, more types of bodily secretions than I can count on my own two hands, and many similar things.  I can handle doing and seeing this much.  I can live through it.  Even so, my comfort for human gore as high as it is, I cannot explain how different the situation is when it's your own body in question--your own body on that operating table and being conscious for the entire process.  Merely writing this paragraph is making my body shake.  To look down and see bloody gouges and surgically exposed tissues and the demonstrative manipulation of these open, bleeding wounds on your penis is not something easy to relate to, but believe me, it can change you.

To think that something much more drastic was done to my body shortly after birth with no anesthesia astounds me.  I can't even begin to fathom the sheer terror and stress that the infant goes through.

I don't say this out of conjecture--I say this because I have been there on that table, now, twice: once outside of my elephantine memory's range, and the second time while conscious three weeks ago, and I am still reeling from it.

Routine infant circumcisions are even much more stressful for the baby in question because a much more drastic procedure is done without any form of appropriate anesthesia, all because neonatal physiology cannot stand up to the drugs involved.  I will never be able to idly stand by and allow my own children to pass through that same eye of Hell.  I can never allow this to be done to my children.  Ever.

The anxiety I felt on that table, even as horrid as it was, is nothing compared to that which a baby feels when he is merely days old from a circumcision.  The child invariably screams in agony during the entire bloody procedure, that is unless he goes into a rare form of neurogenic shock (coma) from the pain.  This is unacceptable.  If I ever have a son, I will love him enough to think he is perfect the way he is born--no disassembly required.  If he ever asks why it wasn't done, I will tell him that the very idea of routine infant circumcision is archaic, barbaric, pointless, erroneously "prophylactic," and that I had no right to make that decision for him.  I'll tell him that I loved him enough to think that he was perfect the day he was born.  I have no right to make a decision to modify another's body for no legitimate medical reason.

What we are doing in the US on a grand scale is not so different (in principal, at least) from what people do to little girls in Africa in the case of female genital mutilation (hereby to be referred to as "FGM")--both are amputative, painful, and unnecessary procedures that impugn upon the basic right to bodily integrity, and both have bullshit "justifications" that run alongside.  It is just a question of the tint of the cultural lenses we wear.  We abhor the FGM practices in Africa, but if we were to be objective and remove the colored lenses that we call "cultural perspective" from our own eyes, we would look down upon our own mutilating hands and recognize in horror that the substance covering them is blood of the very same color.

On one hand, we can hear no amount of medical study done about supposed "benefits" (and I am sorry to say that such studies do exist, and that they were even written in the US up until around the 1960s) of FGM--we simply prohibit it on a federal level.  In the same way, I consider both male and female underage genital mutilation/modification practices to be irreconcilable; medical studies be damned!

As a student going into the medical profession, I find the rate of surgical complications (which I can personally atone to being a living hell) and mortality rate (about 9.01 per 100,000, minimum in the US alone in 2010) of routine infant circumcision unacceptable. 

I am very decidedly against any genital modification, alteration, or mutilation being performed on any body part of unconsenting minors of any gender, and this is not ever going to change for me.  If the topic comes up in conversation, I will be able to speak out about it from experience that bad things can and do happen.

The part that frightens me is that if I didn't grow up botched and were to have kids, I don't know what decision I might make for my sons in this matter, although I now recognize that this shouldn't even be a parental decision.  The thought haunts me that if I weren't botched, I don't honestly know if I would have the audacity to break this bloody cycle.

My own father speaking favorably of having my circumcision done to me even in spite of the surgical complication (which is a very alienating thing to do) speaks volumes about where our society is on this issue.  To merely be a circumcised father in America and to not pay forward the pointless and harmful toll of infant circumcision would be to admit in some way that what was done to the father was wrong, and I get the impression that this is more emotional baggage than this type of man can bear.

I can be strong enough to admit this.  I can be strong enough to endure that emotional baggage.  I refuse to pay this pointless bloodshed forward to the next generation.

I originally intended this journal to only be a document about my healing procedure.  The things I write here beyond the bare details of my body are genuinely a part of this healing process for me.  Were these feelings not relevant to this process, I would not include them.

That is all, for now.

28 November 2011: More than two weeks later

The fibroid fissure has become less inflamed, but is still hard to the touch and painful to manipulate.  It has closed, and I don't foresee it being problematic in terms of bleeding anymore.  There is raised tissue below and above the scar where the sutures entered and exited my flesh.

 

The fleshy crater has filled in a bit, but the pit of the wound is still open, oozing, and sensitive.  I am continuing to apply bandages and white petroleum jelly and bacitracin in attempts to keep this wound from drying, scabbing, breaking, and bleeding once more. 

 
Not much else to report apart from my redesign of the bandages to avoid taping the bandage directly onto the shaft of my penis.  I now use clear tape attached to the bandage and cover the sticky side with more tape so that there is no adhesive bared.  I then use the non-sticky tape strip to anchor the bandage with the belt of my pants, or the waistline of my pants.  In more general terms, it is much like wearing a sock with a suspender, I suppose.

22 November 2011: The Last of the Stitches and the Fibroid Fissure Beneath Them

I made it through the night without bleeding again, albeit without much sleep.  The last of my stitches came out in the bandage overnight, leaving raised, firm, pink points of entry/exit into my flesh where the sutures came out.  Under the surface of the formerly sutured fissure of flesh I can feel hard tissue--likely an extracellular collagen matrix from where the skin has been mending itself together.

I am unsure at this point if the hard tissue under this fissure will ever soften into a more normal tissue type.  I fear that this hard, scarred fissure (hereby to be referred to as the "fibroid fissure") may cause discomfort during prospective future intercourse for my both myself and any prospective partner if it doesn't dissolve.  This scar looks and feels almost exactly like the one I have over my eyebrow that I have had since I was seven--hard, and fibroid in nature.  This is not reassuring.

[the eyebrow scar]

The fleshy crater seems relatively unchanged sans for the fact that it seems to have filled in from the bottom ever so slightly, but still shows little signs of narrowing.

I keep saying to myself that I will be able to sleep soon at night, but after the past two nights, I have gotten very little.

I am caking on bacitracin and white petroleum jelly in hopes that keeping these wounds from drying out will improve scar prognosis later.

20 November 2011: Another Lost Stitch

The middle of the three stitches on the shaft came out, coming undone instead of dissolving.

 
The flesh of the shaft scar appears to be healing well.  Perhaps such is merely the after-effect of the dermal adhesive I applied earlier in precaution.

I am taking no chances, and applying more dermal adhesive to the area anyway.

Words cannot quantify how much the dermal adhesive burns in that area, but I am taking no chances on another crater developing.

The flesh in the pit of the fleshy crater looks like raw subdermal tissues exposed.  The crater is prone to drying without application of bacitracin or white petroleum jelly, and the edges of the wound are raised, dry, pink, and tender.  It has filled in a little bit, but not too much.

The above photo shows a sample of how much bacitracin I put on the fleshy crater.

I'm doing OK for now.

18 November 2011

One week after the operation, I am not feeling too bad, now.  The crater seems like it might actually heal and fill in, but I still have my doubts.

The area is a bit red, inflamed, and tender around the edges of the crater and the stitches.  The crater seems to be coming around, perhaps.  The edges of that wound are hard to the touch and tender.  I will be keeping it moist with topical bacitracin and white petroleum jelly as needed.

I was told to never tape anything onto my penis, but this is really the only way to keep the bandage from falling off, and to keep things down there from getting irritated or bloody.  I have since overcome such trepidations by using cloth tape between the gauze and the shaft of the penis, leaving folded over "pull-tabs" for when I need to change things.  I tape on both sides because taping on one side doesn't work too well. 

Erections don't hurt me anymore, which is nice.

Things are looking up, I hope.

14 November 2011: A Lost Stitch and a Fleshy Crater

It's Monday.  I woke up this morning for class, showered, dressed the wound and dressed with clothes.  The first of the stitches came out today after coming undone instead of dissolving, with a slight pin-prick of blood from the corona where the stitch came out.  I thought nothing of it.
I had lecture.  I could not help but wincing occasionally from the pain of things down there.  Walking was much more tender than usual.  Upon examination, I found that what once was a small looking stitched cut where the stitch fell out of my corona was now once more the gaping crater of flesh I saw earlier during the operation when I chanced looking down.  I panicked. 

I called Dr. S' office once more, and hurried off to the university wellness center where I had my first appointment in hopes of finding some sort of dermal adhesive with which I might be able to reseal the fleshy crater.  Over the phone Dr. S said that the hole should fill in, but that if I wanted to try, I could try to seal the edges together with steri-strips or using dermal adhesive.  She seems to really like the word “reepithelialize.” 

I skipped my last class, and rushed to the store to find such a product.  I chose dermal adhesive.  It didn’t work, and burned very badly.  I tried again and again for several hours to get things to stick, but to no avail.  The gouge is still there, and it bled generously.

Application of steri-strips also failed.

I am attempting to let the wound scab, and hope that such a scab will make the fleshy crater fill in, although after seeing some before-and-after photos on the internet of procedures like mine, I don’t have much optimism at the moment of such working out.  At the end of all of this, I will likely still have genitals with an abnormal appearance, but will not be in any more physical discomfort. 

Above: the open crater, bloody photo not shown.

Ditto.

This journal is depressing me.

I feel like there is no escaping from my mutilation, and my last ditch efforts to remedy it seem as though they might fail and still end up leaving me visibly and permanently scarred.  The pain will be gone, and I wish I could be happy with that, but the scars of my butchers are not so easily faded.  Should all of this fall through, I may consider a practice called foreskin restoration, at least to be able to hide the scars.

There is no doubt that my problem is due to a botched circumcision.

I find myself questioning why I am even keeping record of my bitter reflections.  Perhaps some part of me plans on sharing this morbid tale.  Perhaps I might share this with my children someday so that they know what I understood I had to protect them from.  Perhaps I might share this with others who have gone through what I have to share a morbid sense of mutilatory solidarity—a sense of never being alone.  Perhaps I will never share this with anyone.  Perhaps I shall publish this bitter tome and share this with everyone, and it might someday serve as a comical glimpse into the barbarities of old and how some suffered under the pointless knife of tradition.  Perhaps I might share this with my future wife, assuming I ever marry.  I hope that this journal can make her understand why I don’t want my children to suffer as I have under that knife.

These metaliteral reflections notwithstanding, I have reached a new thought and horrid reflection.  I am no longer sure if I hate my body itself, or if I hate what was done to my body.  The line between the two concepts is now blurred to me.  I am now suspecting that my penis will always have the fleshy crater in the glans, albeit in a reepithelialized form as Dr. S fondly predicts.

I have expressed my disgust with this to my father.  I tell him that my penis looks bad, and I express my sense of hopelessness in this—in that my penis will no longer hurt me any more physically, but I express my sense of defeat in that it will probably never look “normal.”  I am beginning to hear regret or remorse in his voice when he speaks to me about this.  This is a marked change in his demeanor in regards to this issue.

Before, it was always “it is not a big deal.”  Now it is “we might be able to do something about this.  I will come to you to help you if I have to.  We can make this right.”  I am wondering if this new change in him is from my tone of helplessness/hopelessness over the phone, or if the weight of the horrors I have lived with all of this time is beginning to press on him too.  I have conceded defeat in this, and it is audible in my voice.  I don’t know if he has ever heard such a tone from me, but it must be off-putting enough to shake him. 

Perhaps he is changing.  Perhaps he isn’t changing.  I don’t know anymore.  All I know is that I am afraid to fall asleep because I fear I could bleed to death without ever waking.  I can't help but think "What the fu** have I done to my body?"

I’m scared.

Today, my best friend told me the nicest thing I had ever heard about this ordeal, and what probably will be the nicest thing I will ever hear in regards to all of this.  She told me “don’t worry about it.  Everything will be fine, I promise.”  I tried so hard to not cry at this.  I made it out of the Library at night before mutely sobbing over all of this with tears welling out of my eyes through the brisk November winds.

11 November 2011: Sudden Surgery

Coming into the appointment, I am unsure of how much I can expect out of Dr. S.  Her curriculum vita indicates that she specializes in nephrology, but I hoped I could trust her to help me with my problem.

As instructed by the receptionist, I arrived at 7:30 AM to provide a urine specimen.  I am unsure why I was asked to do so, since the health institute I went to did not even open until 8:00 AM, and my problem is not nephrologic in nature.

I had the appointment, and showed the doctor my problem.  I know the cause of my problem--a readhesion of the synechia membrane between the glans and my preputial remnant, but Dr. S inaccurately stated the development leading to circumcisions that were botched like mine.  Her etiological shortcomings notwithstanding, she said that she had handled several cases like mine before so I decided to trust her experience as a penile surgeon, and elected for an operation at her offering.  I wanted to be able to sleep at night.  I was told the prognostic cosmology would be good.

The operation was done under local anesthetic, and I was lying on my back on that examination bed made into an impromptu operating table, shaking the entire time.  I felt nothing beyond the first few shots of local anesthetic, which were still a bit nerve wracking.  I was a bit shaken when Dr. S told me to take a look down if I liked when things were said and done.  Worst.  Mistake.  Ever.  It looked like she had excavated the skin bridge from the corona, leaving a large, bloody hole (hereby to be referred to as the "fleshy crater").

I had an unusual but painless sensation when the dissolving sutures were put in place.

The nurse, N, told me to avoid hot dates for a while, in humor.  If only he really knew how true his words had been my entire life for shame of my body and for fear of erection pain.

A topical antibiotic to be vigorously applied twice daily for two weeks as well as acetaminophen were recommended, and I was instructed in how to dress the wounds.

The cosmetics of this operation look relatively good, at least prognostically in comparison to where I was before.  I was told that now that it is stitched and lightly cauterized, the fleshy crater looked as if it would heal nicely without much of a cosmetic blemish beyond the predicted discoloration.  The proximal incision, more towards my body, appears as though it will be well hidden along my circumcision scar.  There are four stitches total—three along the circumcision scar where the proximal end was cut away, and one on the corona where the bridge was excised and the fleshy crater sealed.  There is hardly any pain except for when walking causes the bandages to pull on the stitches.

Below are photos from one day later.  Had some light blood-spotting through the bandages, my boxers, and my jeans.

Bandage removed.  The shine is due to bacitracin ointment being spread all over my penis below the bandages.

Visible above are the four stitches--three along the already present scar, and one sealing the fleshy crater.

Ditto, a close up.

Had a bleeding erection through the night, but bleeding was very light and painless.  I'll plan on not taking acetaminophen at night so that the pain from erections will hopefully keep me from getting them.

Before the Appointment: Photos

I suppose that I should have a few before and after pictures.

Here are some pictures from before the appointment, with explanations in anatomically correct terminology.

In the above photo is visible the scar tissue formation I mentioned earlier, the "skin bridge."  It originates at the circumcision scar to the corona of my glans over the sulcus, and is very tight and painful when my penis becomes erect.  

There is a darker blemish on the left side of my penis just distal to the circumcision scar.  That small dark dot is a scar from when another "skin bridge" ripped apart from about 1/2 the way up my glans, and bled and hurt badly.  This happened when I was 8.  I never told anyone about that until now.  The blemish on the glans is barely visible on the left side.  

 

There are non-bridging adhesions in the center of my sulcus--two small, cosmetic blemishes where the skin adhered confluent to the sulcus as sequelae to my circumcision.  These are sensitive to the touch and get sore very easily.

 

Like its name implies, things may pass under this unusual bridge.  I have awoken to the skin bridge becoming pulled so tightly that it cracks and bleeds, before.

 

Visible here is a chunk missing from the inner mucosa under the corona of the glans, just to the left of the penile frenulum.  Also present are unusual raised, painless, pink bumps on either side of the frenulum.  They are likely hirsuties coronae glandis, aka "pearly penile papules," a harmless anatomical variation in penile appearance and form.

 

Visible on the underside of the shaft is the skin-tag I have on the left side (right on the photo) from a sloppy cut, and just caudal (below) the frenulum there is a darkish dot-like blemish.  I think this may have been where they might have injected local anesthetic for when they performed the circumcision, 21 years ago.  A similar dark mark is visible on the (formerly) inner mucosa to the right of the frenulum caudal to the sulcus.  I have no idea as to what the cause might be for that one.