The Device His Doctors Had for 15 Years and Never Mentioned
Episode #41 - Men, Cancer, and Sex
Three weeks after a prostatectomy that saved his life, Mike Prescott was in the shower, unable to walk across the floor without leaving a trail of urine, convinced he would never be intimate with his wife Shirley again.
Earlier that day, he’d caught himself on the sidewalk beside oncoming traffic, thinking about stepping into it. Not because of the cancer. Because nobody had told him there was a way back to the intimate life he and Shirley had built over 49 years of marriage.
His surgeon had listened. He’d done nerve-sparing surgery and told Mike to expect recovery in 18 to 24 months. But nobody talked about the in-between — those months when your body doesn’t work and your mind starts telling you it never will again.
A week later, his physical therapist — not his surgeon, not his urologist — handed him a piece of paper about a vacuum erection device. When Mike called his doctor’s office to ask why nobody had mentioned it, he learned they’d been using the device for 15 years.
Mike says that device may have saved his life. Not because it fixed everything overnight, but because it told him a path back to Shirley existed.
Only 5.4% of cancer patients say their healthcare provider brought up sexual health before treatment started. Five out of a hundred. The other 95 were left to figure it out alone — or never figure it out at all.
Tim Baker was 50 when Stage 4 prostate cancer took his testosterone, his libido, and eventually his marriage. Nobody offered alternatives. Daniel Garza’s anal cancer and ostomy took away the sexual identity he’d carried his entire adult life as a gay man, and no one on his team ever acknowledged the loss. Three men, three different cancers, the same silence.
In this week’s episode of Kicking Cancer’s Ass, all three sit down — along with Shirley — and get specific about what works, what doesn’t, and what they wish someone had said before treatment started.
Here’s what I’d ask you to do with this episode: share it with a man in your life. And the next time you or anyone you love faces a medical procedure — cancer or not — ask the doctor directly: how will this affect my sex life, and what are my options to preserve it? Because if 5.4% of providers are starting that conversation, the other 94.6% are waiting for you to bring it up.
The subscriber article this week digs into why that number is so low and what it would take to change it.