Day 4
Resurrecting this after nearly 2 years!
I made it to March 2020 (around 18 months) with no porn, though masturbation continued throughout. Covid turned my life upside down, I'd made plans to quit my highly stressful job, travel a bit then take my career in a different direction but all of that had to be cancelled. The removal of the braces from my teeth was also delayed by around 4 months, this all proved too much, my mood fell through the floor and I succumbed to PMO. It's been over a year since and I haven't been able to rein it in despite several 1 month+ long periods of abstinence, though I am now once again 100% committed to moving on.
The reason I returned to this thread is that I've put together a timeline of erectile performance issues as this has continued to go downhill, so I want to figure out when things started to deteriorate and what has caused it. It's a completely different ED to the PIED I had before. I exhibit several symptoms of hard flaccid without the actual hard flaccid penis or pelvic pain. It continues to feel disconnected from my body and has a rubbery texture and a fairly unpleasant sensation. It's much smaller in a flaccid state than it used to be and can look shrivelled. I feel like I have PIED and a different, physical kind of ED both going on at the same time. It has a cold, sour feel to it and sometimes this can reverberate through my whole body and I can feel like I want to shake it out.
A pelvic floor physiotherapist said my symptoms are consistent with various accounts of hard flaccid and did an ultrasound scan which showed possible signs of a tight pelvic floor. I have been given exercises to do based on belly breathing and pelvic floor relaxation. I'm not 100% convinced it's pelvic floor-related due to the absence of any pain.
Potential causes of the current issues are:
- 'herbal viagra' that I bought from Amazon in early 2018 - highly unlikely but I do have a journal entry referencing inability to get an erection from masturbation just after the effects wore off.
- Crossfit (late 2017)
- bodyweight app-based exercises (various times from mid-2018 onwards)
- manual kegels (late 2018-mid-2019)
- electronic kegel machine (mid-2019 to early 2020). This is the most likely cause in the physio's view.
- 2 masturbation techniques I started using in 2019 - 1) aiming a shower head at the back of the glans, 2) using a bathroom sink (putting the back of the penis on the top of the sink and putting my hand on the top of the penis). Neither of these were painful at the time however.
- cold showers where I would aim the water at my penis and testicles for a prolonged period (2019 sometime) - probably unlikely but when I first started cold showers it would often give me an erection but this stopped happening the longer I did them.
- stress from worrying about my life situation and not knowing what to do (early 2019 - late 2020 - I have now changed career and am really happy)
Anyway, just putting this here to document the upcoming reboot.