Dicking About

I'd like to talk about what I've been doing with my penis.

With pictures.

I have type 2 diabetes, which means among other things:

1) My immune system is weakened, and like everyone else I'm covered in miscellaneous bacteria and funguses, which in most people, most of the time, don't flare up into visible infections.

But they do with me, so I get rashes and minor infections.

2) The sugar in my blood has difficulty getting into the organs which need it, so it hangs around, triggering the kidneys to work overtime flushing it out, triggering excessive thirst for water to flush with, and excessive urination.

Which means my urine contains a lot of sugar. Yes, I have sweet pee.

Which means any drops that leak out late after a bathroom visit, leak onto the surface of the glans. Giving the native fungi and bacteria all the nutrition they could want. Turning my bellend into a hemispherical petri dish, with sore red blotches.

So for two distinct reasons, I get rashes, and especially in places I especially don't want them.

The practical upshots of which are:

1) If I weed in your coffee, you wouldn't need sugar, and

2) I'm probably cleaner than you are, because I scrub pretty thoroughly, with anti-bacteriological soap.

But, last February, an infection got through. I had a recurrence of shingles, and simultaneously...something else, more minor, possibly let through by the shingles, probably something fungal. Under the arms and...yes.

I'd had it before - in fact, it was what got me diagnosed diabetic - and as before I got rid of it with clotrimazone and hydrocortisone. You can use the same stuff for athlete's foot...and thrush. I have to wonder how much athlete's foot medication gets bought to be put on other areas.

Now, something I didn't know at the time. Clotrimazole is an anti-fungal, and hyrdocortisone is a steroid anti-inflammatory. And you can get them individually or in combination without prescription, if the affected area isn't the face, genitals or anus.

If the areas are (for instance) the armpits and the groin, you can get it. If it's just the groin, or just the anus, or just the face, you need a doctor's prescription for it. It's exactly the same stuff, at exactly the same strength (1%), but there's an extra bureaucratic hoop to jump through.

So if you need it for your knob, you have to say it's for something else. Or you do what I did - get a prescription from your doctor. Except I couldn't, because I'm planning to leave the country in a fortnight, and my doctor decided to deregister me immediately. And it takes several weeks and a shedload of hassle to re-register.

So I found a drop-in clinic instead. But first...a detour.

I'd treated the infection, and my skin was back to it's healthy pink - or purple - colour. But there was ... (dramatic music stab) ... an aftermath.

About 5% of uncircumcised men have something called 'frenulum breve'. Or 'short bowstring'. The frenulum is that cord of skin along the underside of the glans which connects it to the foreskin. It's essentially an anchoring device. It's also the most sensitive part of the penis - which means tickling it gives the greatest pleasures...and damaging it is agony.

If your bowstring is short, it'll probably make zero difference, unless you're very unlucky and very, uh, vigorous with your pulling, stroking and thrusting. It can rip, and that's just as bad as it sounds.

Or if the area's been infected, it can get swollen, and sensitive in a bad way. Feeling like it's been ripped. And stay that way for months after infection.

My string's always been short. But now it's short and swollen and feels like there's a needle through it. Pulling back to have a wee is a delicate process. And as for wanking, forget it.

Doesn't stop me sucking off other men, so that's been a great comfort to me in these trying times.

Now, guess what the treatment for a swollen string is? For the pain, lidocaine. Not novocaine for the soul, but lidocaine for the pole. And for the actual condition? That's right, it's clotrimazole and hydrocortisone again.

I tried to buy them over the counter - the same counter I'd got them from twice before - only to be told that now I needed a prescription. Which I couldn't get. So I tried other things.

Savlon, everyone's go-to antiseptic cream.

Sudocrem, which is useful for many things, and at a pinch could be used as greasepaint if you're a clown, but no use to me here.

E45 lotion - except they didn't have any so I got, er, the next best thing.


Some things I did not try.

But I did try a lot of things for my painful penis. There were a lot of gunks on my junk, before I discovered the drop-in clinic. And a nurse who was much more clued-up and understanding than my doctor had ever been. In fact, I've generally found female nurses more use than male doctors.

True, she did mention circumcision as an option, but I've got no desire to lose 60% of the nerve endings in my second favourite organ. So I got a prescription for the same stuff again over the same counter.

So with luck in about a week...I'll be able to make use of that extensive free porn collection.

Eventually though, there will probably have to be frenular surgery. Which I shall of course tell you all about.