bilateral orchiectomy
triplecrush (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 24, 2011 7:55 am
Hello everyone! Just found this site and hoping it will be helpful although some stuff I have read has been disturbing never the less I am looking for information. Not fantasy information bit solid information regarding orchiectomy aka castration. I go into surgery tomorrow to have both my testicles removed due to tumors found. I am curious what to expect as a heterosexual male. I live a somewhat normal life and have an average sex drive. I have banked sperm already but I am very curious as to any feedback from others I may be able to get.
I was given a bilateral orchiectomy, and a total colectomy with ileo-rectal anastomosis in the summer of 1986, now slightly more than 25 years ago. While I post on the Eunuch Archive with my Archive user name of janekane, I have also posted comments elsewhere, using my real name and professional identification. I have no objection to people linking my Eunuch Archive presence to my real name and/or professional identification, AND, OUT OF RESPECT FOR, and appropriate deference to, the Archive at-large membership, very strongly prefer that anyone who "figures out my actual identity" keep that to self or communicate with me by Private Message.
I diligently seek to avoid acting out the role of an Exceptional Member of the Eunuch Archive.
I am a member of a family kindred in which some people have a rare genetic condition, familial adenomatous polyposis (or for short, FAP) (aka Gardner's Syndrome), and people who have FAP have an average age of death, as I read the relevant medical literature, of 42 years unless "draconian" surgeries are done prior to cancer developing. No one in my close family kindred who developed cancer as a result of having a form of the FAP genome had the slightest symptom of cancer before cancer had become terminal. I, and not any physician, figured out the family cancer risk first, and I successfully sought cancer-preventive surgeries for myself, but could not accomplish that for my brother, three years older than me. My brother, as he died, validated my cancer risk concern. I still cry about that.
After studying physics in college for 3 years, I transferred to a bioengineering program, in which I completed my undergraduate degree (B.S.) and later, my Ph.D. I am very well aware that I am far from the only Eunuch Archive member to get a Ph.D. I life in Wisconsin, and am a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer (one of a fair number who have degrees in bioengineering (also called biomedical engineering). As a Professional Engineer, I am required to work within the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, the essence of which I can summarize as "An engineer shall hold paramount the public safety, work only in areas of professional competence, and do so without deception."
The first edition (copyright 1969) of David R. Reuben, M.D.'s book "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex--But Were Afraid to Ask," David McKay Co., New York has what I find to be a reasonable account of the range of experiences of men who have been castrated, and the physiology of castration, for whatever reason, has not significantly changed since then. Dr. Reuben rather well describes the considerable variability of experienced results.
From op.cit., page 21,
One evening at a dinner party Dr. Freud was confronted by a belligerant student who demanded, "Isn't it true, Dr. Freud, that the way a man feels about himself depends on the size of his penis?" Freud reflected for a moment, puffed on his ever-present cigar, and replied, "I would prefer to think that the size of the penis depends upon the way a man feels about himself."
The "All New Edition" of Reuben's book, published in 1999, omits almost all the biology and is mainly focused on the social aspects of human sex, or so I find.
For myself, the choice seemed very simple. I could plausibly be alive with dead testicles and a dead colon, or I could plausibly have a dead everything. I never met a totally dead person who objected to any loss of sexuality. What is my source of expertise regarding this? I have attended open casket funerals.
Reuben clarifies, as well as any other source I have yet found that was written for the general public, the remarkable range of human diversity with respect to human sexuality. For myself, the only really major happening following my bilateral orchiectomy in 1986 was sexuality becoming entirely optional; if I got busy (who said that an intellectual is a person for whom there is something even more important than sex?) doing something interesting to me (and therefore significantly intellectual), before my orchiectomy, hormone-driven sexual reflexes commonly distracted me from things I found more interesting, after my orchiectomy, those distractions simply and very quietly vanished into memories readily recollected when I am willing to recollect them.
With appropriate HRT, my conjecture is simple: The main thing you are most likely to notice over the long term is that you are not dead yet.
As I find Dr. Reuben accurately recognized, the largest sex organ in the human body is the brain.
I seem to have been given a brain that was, and is, predisposed to the expectation of to residing within a female body (GID = Gender Identity Diversity?). Therefore, my experience with orchiectomy is likely to be rather different than the experience of a person whose brain gender and body gender reasonably well match.
It might be fair to regard myself as a person who started out with a female brain and male body, got an orchiectomy (and total colectomy with ileo-rectal anastomosis) in 1986, was put on Premarin and Provera in 1989, and went through a Premarin-Provera discontinuation menopause variation in circa 2000. Thus, I am not a proper comparison standard for heterosexual males, except, perhaps, in one particular way. I choose to accept the life I find I am actually able to life in preference to having a life I am actually unable to live. For me, having a life I am actually unable to live is identically being dead.
Please do not think or feel or believe that the way I am able to write this accurately reflects the difficulty of the decisions my life journey led me into. Some life choices can be awfully, awefully difficult.
For me, awfully, awefully difficult choices are somewhat easier to survive when I find I am not as though alone.
Triplecrush, I wish for you the very best possible outcome of your surgery, and the very best possible future life.
. Ill be posting detailed blog later so keep an eye out for it. I wish I would have been able to read experiences sooner myself and I hope my journal helps others out there. I feel great and look forward to the future.