The second part of three telling a story about Jacques’s and my sexual lives together. (Warning: all three parts are entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
The first part — my 12/30/20 posting “Manual labor” — was about a project of J’s, to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me. J’s project was an expression of great love, magnificently achieved. I have never felt more intensely attended to.
This part of the story is, sadly, “Decline”, in which J’s sexual abilities disintegrate, fairly rapidly, to zero, though he still sometimes recalled his intense desire to please me.
The story turns out to be more complex than I thought at first; there will be periodic digressions into significant related topics.
First digression: pleasing him and pleasing yourself. It would be a mistake to think that J’s pleasure in jacking me off was entirely, or even primarily, a matter of pleasing me. J was, after all, a queer guy, and queer guys are characterized by being aroused by dicks (rather than, as our straight brothers are, by pussies). Dealing with dicks — handling them, stroking them, enjoying the texture of hard dicks, their smell, their mouth-feel, the power of their ejaculations — all these are intense pleasures on their own for queer guys.
Sex is a two-way street. J gave me the pleasures of his attentions to my dick, and I gave him full access to the pleasures of my dick. (And he did the same for me)
Medical matters I: erectile dysfunction. The first event I don’t have a record of, but I’m guessing it was in the early 1990s. I would characterize it as profound erectile dysfunction, a label I’ll explain in steps.
Digression: erectile dysfunction (ED). The name of a symptom: a man’s inability to achieve or sustain a stiff erection, of the sort required for fucking. According to the Wikipedia article,
Causes of or contributors to ED include the following: … Aging: It is four times more common in men aged in their 60s than those in their 40s.
Medications: The PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra) and tadalafil (Cialis) are prescription drugs which are taken by mouth. As of 2018, sildenafil is available in the UK without a prescription.
This is what I think of as the ED of aging, which I view as a frequent, and entirely normal, concomitant of aging in men, annoying though it might be for some. I myself have had the ED of aging for ten years or so, with almost no consequences for my life: I haven’t had any sexual contact with another person for nearly 20 years now, so I have no call for stiff hard-ons (and if I did, the PDE5 inhibitors are available for the occasion, though I’d be wary of mixing one of these drugs with my other medications).
Significantly, the ED of aging interferes in no way with my daily routines of jacking myself off, which I can regulate as fast or slow with my hand, and which provide me with very satisfying ejaculations. That is, the only thing affected is the stiff hard-ons.
I go into such detail about my personal situation because what happened to Jacques was quite different from this — what I’ve come to think of as profound ED. And its onset changed the character of our sex life.
J’s profound ED. Over a short period of time, J lost essentially all of his sexual response — not just the stiff hard-ons that played a key role in the fucking that provided the two of us with such pleasure (he fucked me beautifully, indeed was (justly) proud of his ability to drive me to sexual ecstasy with his dick inside me), but all of his response to my jacking him off or sucking his cock (or, in fact, to my fucking him; occasionally that had been exactly what he wanted, and it pleased me to give him the experience). Very suddenly he was inert.
At the time, new and alarming neurological symptoms were beginning to appear with some frequency in J’s life, all of them baleful consequences of damage to his brain from the radiation treatments that had saved his life years earlier. I’m not sure why I didn’t take notes (in the medical history that I kept for his doctors) on his profound ED; possibly I thought it would have shamed him if I’d talked about such deficits to other people — as, indeed, it would have.
Meanwhile, from my medical notes:
1995, clear evidence of anosognosia (a-noso-gnosia, ‘not-disease-know’, inability to recognize disease or deficit) appears; presumably a symptom of cerebral ischemia on the right side (also manifested by a period of left neglect in 1998)
Eventually, the anosognosia took over J’s consciousness entirely, and he no longer knew that he was damaged. As I’ve written elsewhere, that’s very much a mixed blessing.
But while the anosognosia was advancing, J still sometimes recalled his intense desire to please me sexually. However, even jacking me off eventually failed; his attention wandered, and once, to his mortification, he just fell asleep mid-act and didn’t know where he was when he came to (or why he had my dick in his hand).
And then a surprise. Next, J became deeply listless. I reported this in a 1997 conversation with his Stanford family doctor, adding that J had quite suddenly ceased to have a smell. (Scents, especially bodily scents, are very significant to me, and J’s sex scent was deeply satisfying to me. Suddenly it was gone.)
The doctor looked grave and said he was getting us an appointment, immediately, with an endocrinologist. And so we discovered panhypopituitarism. From Wikipedia:
Hypopituitarism is the decreased (hypo) secretion of one or more of the eight hormones normally produced by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. If there is decreased secretion of one specific pituitary hormone, the condition is known as selective hypopituitarism. If there is decreased secretion of most or all pituitary hormones, the term panhypopituitarism (pan meaning “all”) is used.
… Most pituitary hormones can be replaced indirectly by administering the products of the effector glands: hydrocortisone (cortisol) for adrenal insufficiency, levothyroxine for hypothyroidism, testosterone for male hypogonadism
Essentially, the radiation treatments had damaged J’s pituitary gland, and the damage accumulated over the years, to the point where his pituitary eventually ceased to function at all.
So, for the rest of J’s life, regular replacements of all three of these hormones, which brought some energy back to J and restored a shadow of his sex scent, just a bit of tang.
To come. In part three of this story, “Superbowl Sunday”, J transcends these failures of the body and mind to give me one more great gift of love.
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