Thursday, 9 August 2012

Why I had the procedure in the first place


Firstly, let me start off by explaining why I got a circumcision. I had read many accounts online before of peoples’ personal experiences and felt really strange, as they really seemed to know what they were doing and didn’t seem freaked out to the extent that I was. I suffered from a condition called Phimosis, which is quite common. Phimosis is an abnormality in the foreskin (the skin which covers the head of your penis), which results in difficulty in pulling the foreskin back over the glans (head) to reveal it. The ability to do this is essential both for hygiene reasons, and for those of sexual pleasure. Sometimes phimosis is so severe that you can’t actually retract the foreskin at all, meaning that various activities, such as sex are, very difficult or impossible.

My phimosis was pretty bad, so I sympathise with anybody who reads this and has the condition. The strange thing was that I didn’t even know there was anything ‘wrong’ with me until I was about 16. Guys don’t tend to talk about things like this the same way women do. It was only when I went to the Doctor for an unrelated thing that he told me I was supposed to be able to pull the skin back. Well that was news to me! He referred me to a specialist to have a circumcision right away.

If only it had turned out that way. The letter from the hospital never arrived, and as I was kind of ‘used to it’, I just put it off thinking I could get it done whenever I wanted. I met a girl shortly after and somehow (don’t ask me how) I managed to explain the condition to her, and we ‘got around it’. She never put pressure on me to get it done and left it totally up to me when I decided to follow it up. The next time I visited a doctor regarding my foreskin, I was 25 years old. Even this is not the end of the story.

I was referred to a local consultant who booked me in for a surgery day at my local hospital. I arrived at around 7am, and was given a pre-op examination and told to ‘wait my turn’. Apparently there were around 5 other males having procedures that day, and the ‘running order’ was not divulged to us. Well guess what? I was last on the list. This meant that when one guy needed an additional amount of time in his slot, I got bumped off the rota. I was told at about 6pm that I wouldn’t be having my surgery today after all, and would need to rearrange for another time!

At this time in my life, I was not going through the best of times in terms of nerves and worry. Having to sit in a hospital waiting room for 11 hours waiting to be operated on had taken it out of me already. Being told that I was not even going to have the procedure done was something that massively discouraged me. So I went home and did not contact the hospital again.

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