‘The Viagra was handed to me as though it were a live bomb’

Bob McQuaid, a 29-year-old new dad, opens up about his years struggling with erectile dysfunction and how he got help in the end.

The original article was published in The Journal and can be found here. https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/premature-ejaculation-and-viagra-6103420-Sep2023/ 

YOU KNOW THE feeling you get when you meet ‘the one’, the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, and you’ve got this burning love and urge, that pull to be with them but you can’t express it? That was my experience when I met the mother of my child, my now fiancée, back in 2020.

“I can’t stay tonight.” “I’m too tired.” “Can we just cuddle?” These were all excuses I had become familiar with using to avoid looking at what had stared me in the face for the previous 10 years of my life. I was a young man with a lot of talents, confidence in abundance, surrounded by girls; yet riddled with a dark secret.

I had tried to have sex for all of my adult life, without success. I had relationships so opportunity was not my issue. There’s a natural pattern to any relationship and when you’re young like that, after a certain time it’s pretty much expected that once both parties are consenting, of course, sex becomes part of the deal.

I would imagine that couples with a ‘healthy’ sex life have an awkward phase initially, but once they get used to one another and a familiar intimacy develops, it all starts to flow. Well, for me and any girlfriend, every attempt to have sex was like that first awkward time, and things just didn’t improve, ever. I just could not perform.

At first, I put it down to nerves and inexperience but as time went on it became clear that it wasn’t as simple as that. Countless hotel rooms, trips away and dream holidays that promised so much but all ended in the same way.

Just not functioning

The longer this went on, the more it started to affect me and my relationships. I started to feel more and more isolated. The idea of any sexual activity at all became something that I wanted to avoid at all costs and being so young, it was not an easy subject to address over conversations, so it just continued as the awkward elephant in the room. Naturally, the longer I was in any relationship, the more people might feel inclined to mention us getting married and becoming parents. Every time someone would mention kids, I would freeze, hold my breath and wait for it to be over as I knew it wasn’t possible. The pressure was unreal.

I thought about going to see a doctor so many times over the years but I was so ashamed, embarrassed and afraid of what they would say was wrong with me, so I avoided the GP. I felt that it was my fault that I couldn’t have sex and that it was something I would have to fix myself. When it came to doctors, I carried my own bias as I don’t feel comfortable with them in general. As a result, going to a GP or a hospital didn’t seem like an option to me.

Without health insurance too, private doctors seemed worlds away. It was only later in my life after my now fiancée Fiona urged me to be honest with her about why we weren’t having sex, that I discovered what was wrong with me by Googling my symptoms. Seems ridiculous now, saying it back but that was the level of fear and shame I had carried around sexual function for years.

Phimosis & Erectile Dysfunction

When checking symptoms I found a specialist doctor and I decided it was now or never. When I went for my first consultation, he quickly told me to take everything off and instantly held my penis in his hands. As he started to assess and talk to me about my penis, he assured me that this was a common condition and ‘a simple circumcision’ would fix it. So there it was, the issue that had plagued me for so many years, it could be fixed next week in a short operation under general anaesthetic. It was all as simple as that.

The official diagnosis was Phimosis. It occurs when the foreskin is too tight to be pulled back over the penis. According to the Cleveland Clinic, virtually all males are born with this condition and between the ages of two and six, their foreskin loosens up and begins to separate from the head of the penis. Interestingly, it is estimated that only 1% of people still have this condition when they reach the age of 16.It is a surprising and worthy statistic given that I first discovered I had an extreme form of this condition at the age of 26.

This was in 2020 and after seeking this medical advice, I was circumcised. Health insurance companies in Ireland at the time considered it a ‘cosmetic’ surgery. The operation was a success and I recovered well. Before the procedure, I had half opened up to my partner Fiona about everything, so she was expecting me to be declared ‘fit to play’ once the injury had healed.

Things didn’t go according to plan. After the operation, I could get an erection but it would never last long enough to have sex. I had hoped everything was going to be okay but every time we tried to have sex, it wouldn’t work again but for different reasons. It was like reliving the trauma of my early twenties again. Lots of stress and disappointment, another night going to bed knowing that it hadn’t happened. There were some false dawns that I wanted to be able to count but Fiona assured me I could not. It seemed the gods had decided they weren’t finished with my humiliation and so they sent me… Erectile Dysfunction.

Little blue pill

“Getting it up,” was a phrase I heard for the first time around 11 or 12. It was always used as a joke about old men or as an insult reserved for undesirables. We were conditioned to believe that ‘real men’ never had a problem getting it up.

It seems that in nearly ……………………. To read the remainder of this article please visit https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/premature-ejaculation-and-viagra-6103420-Sep2023/