New user, here's my story

[meson]

After reading many of the posts on this site I suppose my story won't sound very special, but I need to get it out as I have not really talked about this with anyone. Any support/advice will be greatly appreciated, and I will try to not be too negative and just tell it how it is.

My story starts in October 2008 (I may have had problems before that, but not bad enough for me to be aware of, and I was 27 at this time by the way). At that time, for no apparent reason, I started to notice that I needed to urinate a LOT more than normal. Also, I noticed that sometimes it would be hard to start the flow and usually not much would come out. I thought this was weird but didn't really think much of it at first and hoped it would go away on its own if I just drank lots of water and cranberry juice. This went on for a couple of weeks and nothing seemed to change for a little while, and then over the course of a couple of days came the pain. As I said, it came on somewhat slowly over a few days, but eventually I was in excruciating pain in my pelvis, mainly around my bladder, in my penis, and my lower back. I could not sit, I could barely walk, I had to spend several weeks in bed only getting up to urinate (which was probably every 20 minutes). At this time I had no medical insurance and not much money so I was reluctant to go to a doctor (usually my body would heal itself eventually) but as my girlfriend at the time had very recently had a UTI I thought my condition could be related to hers and I might need some antibiotics. So I finally sucked it up and found a doctor who would see me quickly. She took a urine sample, did a DRE, and took some blood (to test my PSA levels). Of course, my urine showed no sign of infection, my prostate felt fine, and my PSA levels were normal (I can't remember what they were now). But she decided to prescribe 10 days of Levaquin anyway. I took the medicine and by the end of the 10 days I felt "fine" (I didn't really feel fine, just not nearly as bad as I had, I'll get back to that) but I had this feeling that the antibiotics had nothing to do with it. Prior to this I had been suffering from really bad allergies (I'm still not sure from what) for about a year, and had been taking benadryl almost daily. The benadryl was making me so tired all of the time and I didn't want to take it anymore, so I eventually tried claritin. Claritin seemed to help my allergies and not make me as tired, but it was shortly after I started taking it that I started showing the symptoms described above. So I looked up "side effects of claritin" on google and found that pretty much all of my symptoms were listed. So I attributed my "recovery" to stopping taking claritin. (Interestingly enough, I read a post on here by a guy who seemed to think that claritin was a cure for his CPPS).

Now as I said I eventually recovered to a point that I wasn't bed-ridden anymore and could function in the world, but pretty much ever since then there has been a constant dull pain at the base of my penis, sometimes in the penis itself. The worst part is that also ever since then I have had a hard time getting/maintaining an erection and when I do it does not seem as hard as it should be. This seems to be pretty extreme ED for chronic prostatitis / chronic pelvic pain syndrome but they both happened at the same time so I cannot help but think they are related. This lead to the eventual collapse of my relationship about a year ago, which at the time I blamed on other things, it is hard to admit to yourself that you have a problem like this, and somehow I was able to push it aside for quite some time, but looking back now it all seems crystal clear. I should also note that during this time most of my other symptoms (urgency,frequency) were completely gone, only the pain and the ED.

Last August I moved from California to Missouri for graduate school. At first I was really excited about everything and things were looking pretty good for me and my life. I still had a constant dull pain around my bladder, and when I would masturbate I would notice that my erection seemed weak, but I could still ejaculate just fine, so I still somehow managed to not pay too much attention to it. Well, as the semester went on I became more and more depressed and felt really lonely, etc. I went back to California for a month during the holidays which I thought would be really good for me. Well, somehow while I was there I started becoming really unsure about everything that was going on in my life, wondering if I had made the right decisions, etc., and became really anxious and started having really bad insomnia (this was around the middle of December). One day I decided to masturbate to relieve some of the tension I was feeling when I discovered I could not get any erection at all. I know that it probably would have been hard for anyone to get an erection in the state that I was in, but somehow everything came crashing down on me at that time. I realized that I have had this problem for a long time, and it was the first time I admitted to myself that this was the main reason that my relationship had failed almost a year earlier. Needless to say, this increased my anxiety extremely. I went to a doctor for this who prescribed my Xanax. I took the Xanax for a few days, when what should happen but another "flare up," pretty much identical to the one I described above. (I'm not sure if it was caused by the Xanax or just the anxiety, but seemed to go away slowly after I stopped the Xanax.) So I got to spend new years in excruciating pain at my parents house.

Since I knew I would be coming back to Missouri soon (that is where I live now) I decided to wait until I got back to see any doctors about it. By the time I got back my symptoms were not nearly as acute as they had been, but this time more of them have stuck around. Right now (and for the last month or so) the pain has been very dull, but I am still suffering from ED, and the urgency and frequency of urination seem to be here to stay this time. I went to a GP a few weeks ago who did a urine test, and a urethral swab to test for STDs (which seemed silly to me because I haven't had sex in almost a year) which all came back negative. She did a DRE, and said that my prostate felt slightly enlarged and "tender." That is when I received the diagnosis "chronic nonbacterial prostatitis." Luckily she did not try to prescribe me any more antibiotics because there was no sign of bacterial infection. Anyway, I have a follow up with her tomorrow at which point she will most likely refer me to a urologist, who will probably run a few tests to rule out anything else that can be causing these symptoms, and then tell me I'm on my own.

The physical pain I am in right now is nothing compared to the emotional pain. I keep thinking that I will probably never have sex again, and I will never be able to get married and have a family. I also keep thinking that if I only could have admitted that I had this problem earlier that I might have been able to save the relationship that I had, but instead I made her feel like it was mostly her fault. I haven't exactly had a whole lot of luck with the ladies in general, and now my confidence is so shot that I have a hard time think about the future at all. I know it doesn't do me any good to get stuck in these kinds of thought patterns, but it is so hard not too. Any words of encouragement would be greatly appreciated.

[webslave]

You're in the self-inflicted downward spiral stage, complete with catastrophic thinking.

The most encouraging thing I can say is that this is entirely reversible, but a lot of it is up to you.

[carld]

You can read my starter list if you want and go from there...

This is manageable like webslave said...but it has to come from you...

Best