Back in December I drove up here to the clinic to consult with Dr. Brassard. It was an arduous trip; there and back again in a day, with snowy driving in the White Mountains. I had to leave very early, but I made it in time, and after a brief wait in an elegant waiting room I heard a soft masculine voice call my name.
Dr. B welcomed me into his office with continental courtesy. He was impeccably dressed, handsome, and charming - a man for whom the word "suave" would be apt and complimentary. He made polite chat for a minute, and then went into his spiel. I already knew most of it, being the sort of patient who does her homework, but one bit caught me a little off guard: the part where he knit his brows and explained that I might not have much sexual sensation after surgery. I knew about this, of course, but he seemed to feel the need to stress the point. "The pleasure might be mostly psychological," he said regretfully.
I had two reactions to this information. The first was the jolt of the instant memory of a couple of transcendently tender moments when I had felt my being melting into another's...mostly psychological? This is a warning? The second was more somber: an internal gesture of resignation. There in his office I took a deep breath and let it out again and accepted that I might never have another orgasm after the surgery. It would still be worth it...but oh, it was sad.
Well. No doubt what Dr. B said is sometimes true; but not for me. Only five days out from surgery, I have already had some very promising sensations. Shall I describe them to you in detail? OK, I shall. Warning/promise: this is gonna get graphic.
The first came the second night after surgery - a wee-hour insomniac moment of experimentation with nipple stimulation. Drugged, physically traumatized, and acutely uncomfortable as I was, I hardly expected the answering tickle under the dressings and ice, but there it was. Faint, yes, but undeniable.
A day or two later, waking from a nap, feeling warm and loose, I found my imagination straying into a romantic/erotic vein...earnest eyes and a first kiss from a certain someone I have noticed...that person's hands on my body...and I was startled by the rush of warm electricity within what really no longer feels much like the tip of my penis. It's in the wrong place, and the sensations are different too - more directly connected to the other nerves of my body. I experienced an only small and localized sensation of tumescence, and then a tingling thrum of pleasure pulsing up and down through my body in time to my heartbeat. Oh my.
Then there was this morning. Manon had came to remove my stent, which involved more snipping of tight sutures (see last post), an exquisite sensation of opening up in a way I have never been able to open up before, and then the bizarre slurpy excretion (at last!) of the stent, which looked like a fat white cigar wrapped in a blood-smeared baggie. After I had rested for a few minutes it was time for my first dilation. With Manon looking on dispassionately, ready if needed to correct my technique, I lay back naked on my bed, applied a dollop of lube to the top of the tip of the smallest of my four dilators - the purple one - maneuvered it awkwardly in the mirror down to the place where the sutures meet, and then slowly slid it inside myself.
The sensations of insistent pressure and yielding glide once again activated what I am just going to have to start calling my clitoris, and that same pulsing warmth began to course up my stomach, down my thighs. It didn't last - I was concentrating too hard on the clinical - but the nerves were all definitely connected and primed to respond. And, honey, I mean, I'm still swollen and sore and bloody, and the incisions pull and bind, and the hair starting to grow back is all the time prickling...if I'm so responsive now with all that going on, what's it going to be like in three months? In six? In a year? Holy fuck.
And that's still not all. There's this other sensation I have been feeling, not precisely sexual, but definitely sensual. It's connected, I suspect/hope, with the techniques I have learned about in my dabblings with meditation and yoga, in which spine and breath become conduits of energy and life. It happens at random moments: a pixilated tingling which suddenly appears in the lower part of my back and then, if I relax into it and breathe from way down, flashes quickly all over my body before fading away. I've had it all my life, but *never* this frequent or intense - and again, I'm only five days post op. The most intense one, earlier today, had a concerned nurse asking me why I was leaning against a table and gasping. "I think I sort of might be having an orgasm," I said. She blinked, then laughed and said, "Oh? Well, have fun!"
A dominant theme of my transition from the beginning has been *unclenching*. In the past three and a half years I have uncurled myriad decades-stony fists, releasing a tremendous amount of physical, mental, psychological, and emotional tension. But that may have only been the prelude, because for all the sexy moments I've had this week, still the most intense sensation by far has been that feeling of previously unimaginable opening when Manon cut that last suture this morning. It was as if the two sides of my pelvis had been freed to sigh minutely away from each other; as if, at that mystic spot where the spine roots to the pelvis, a lock fell away and an iron sphere opened and after a lifetime of narrow constraint my lowest chakra began to glow and spin, throwing out spiral tendrils of divine essence.
As soon as I can I do believe I am going to restart meditation and yoga. It could be very interesting in itself, and it could be even more interesting if the sexy feelings and the stirrings-of-spirit feelings turn out, as it feels they might, to be connectable. Oh my.
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