Vouthon
Peer Supporter
As it says in the title, I am 25 years old (my birthday was only two days ago) and have unfortunately been suffering from chronic pelvic pain since February 2016. I apologise in advance for the info-dump that follows but I can think of no other way of explaining why I'm here.
I'd like to share my experiences in the hope that someone might be able to shed some insight or help steer me in the right direction.....Thank you in advance!
I have, to say the least, been through a year and half (or thereabouts) of hell. My symptoms occur daily - as opposed to "flare-ups" - although they shift considerably in terms of the intensity of the pain and discomfort, sometimes dependent on different activities.
I experience, this being my most consistent affliction, a sharp shooting pain deep within my rectum. On occasion, the pain can extend into or even arise from the perineum - but this is usually only when its at its worst. I also have dysuria, although this symptom fluctuates a lot: some days its very minor and hardly noticeable, some days the burning in the urethra is intense. Generally though, this particular symptom has declined since last year, although I did have a bad "flare-up" of it - if I might use that term - last month prior to a very stressful set of examinations, which leads me to believe that it may be somehow (or at least partly) psychogenic in nature.
Ejaculatory pain and difficulty achieving orgasm has also been a persistent feature of this medical condition. The symptoms are variable - sometimes I get a tightness, like muscular pain, in my perineal area during and after ejaculation; sometimes burning in the urethra and sometimes just a painful twinge. Again, it can be significantly lesser on other occasions and can change depending on how often I'm ejaculating in a given month or week. Ejaculation, from my experience, worsens the symptoms overall.
This all started during a highly stressful period of my life, back in 2016, not long after I had graduated from university and before I acquired a training contract with a corporate law firm. In this interim phase, I found myself in a state of "depression" as I worried about my future and applied for various posts with little-to-no luck. I had graduated university with a first-class degree but did not have a job immediately to go into after my studies finished. Other people I knew did and so as I sat in my parents' house over the Summer and Autumn of 2016, I became deeply distressed about my life and where I was going. I suppose it was an early-to-mid-twenties "life crisis".
At the same time, I became preoccupied with my image ( i.e. fitness, physique), probably because I had so much time on my hands, and felt sort of isolated now that I had nothing to occupy myself with now that my studies had concluded.
For years, I had suffered from bouts of social anxiety. I'm very confident at interviews and when delivering public speeches but have always had few consistent friendships. I tend to befriend people for a while and then become distant. In 2015-2016, I had reached a low ebb because I was no longer at university. I felt alone and knew that many of my peers were progressing with their lives whereas I felt myself stuck in a rut.
For some reason, I had started to blame masturbation for my social anxieties - as a convenient scapegoat for my problems - after reading articles online by a community known as NoFap. I took thereafter to quitting masturbation entirely in late 2015-2016, believing that it would help me. Obviously, I was deeply wrong. This entire obsession had seemed to cause me deeper anxiety and fixation. To this day, I feel that it cannot be a coincidence that I ended with pain in the penile, perineal and anal area - i.e. prostate area - given my months of believing that ejaculation/masturbation was helping to make me socially anxious.
In early 2016, I had finally got an interview for a big corporate law firm and was preparing for a mock interview when, in early February one night after a mock phone interview, I suddenly felt an agonizing jolt of pain in my petroleum, extending right down to my penis and testicles. A day or two later, I developed burning while urinating. I then came down, through bad luck, with a very bad flu type illness that floored me for two weeks.
After recovering from that illness, the symptoms returned with vengeance - just in time for my big interview with the law firm. Despite the pain, I successfully completed the interview and a few weeks later received a training contract to begin in March 2018 after I completed two courses required undertake it.
But I was in no mood to celebrate, given that my health problems were just beginning.
The rest of the year was taken up with me being diagnosed, firstly, with prostatitis and being put on a cocktail of antibiotics. None of them helped my symptoms except for ciprofloxacin, which I was only on for 4 days because it gave me an adverse reaction involving tendon damage in my legs. For some reason, my pelvic symptoms vanished for 2 - 3 months after this - the only real "break" I've had over the last two years - while I focused on my sore, damaged legs.
I thought at the time that this was me out of the woods but no, after a cold virus hit me around August-September 2016, the pelvic symptoms returned and I've had them ever since.
By this time I was at my third urologist and he diagnosed me with chronic pelvic pain syndrome.
In February 2017, a physiotherapist diagnosed me with pudendal neuralgia after a digital rectal exam in which I felt the shooting pain after him touching a certain area, which he identified with the pudendal nerve.
This diagnosis made me feel even worse after reading the PudendalHope forums and learning about "permanent nerve damage" and what-not. I became terrified to sit down for fear of causing further damage to the nerve. I never returned to the said physio again and a medical professional has not since confirmed or denied his "diagnosis" but the one thing I do know is that it hasn't helped me.
In addition to all of this, I'd been having constipation and hard stools since the onset of the symptoms in 2016 and was determined to fix the problem through diet (I.e. eating more fibre). I've been convinced since late 2016 that my constipation issue, which I've only just largely resolved, had been contributing to my problem or may even have sparked it originally.
And so, I'm now on this forum after reading about TMS and wonder if my symptoms could be due - at least in part - to repressed emotions, of which I've certainly had more than a few in my life. I'm still pursuing "structural" causes and hope to get an MRI scan done in the coming weeks but I feel that the emotional turmoil I went through immediately prior to coming down with the CPPS cannot have been coincidental in hindsight. There must, I think, be a causal link between the two.
If anyone can offer some advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I'd like to share my experiences in the hope that someone might be able to shed some insight or help steer me in the right direction.....Thank you in advance!
I have, to say the least, been through a year and half (or thereabouts) of hell. My symptoms occur daily - as opposed to "flare-ups" - although they shift considerably in terms of the intensity of the pain and discomfort, sometimes dependent on different activities.
I experience, this being my most consistent affliction, a sharp shooting pain deep within my rectum. On occasion, the pain can extend into or even arise from the perineum - but this is usually only when its at its worst. I also have dysuria, although this symptom fluctuates a lot: some days its very minor and hardly noticeable, some days the burning in the urethra is intense. Generally though, this particular symptom has declined since last year, although I did have a bad "flare-up" of it - if I might use that term - last month prior to a very stressful set of examinations, which leads me to believe that it may be somehow (or at least partly) psychogenic in nature.
Ejaculatory pain and difficulty achieving orgasm has also been a persistent feature of this medical condition. The symptoms are variable - sometimes I get a tightness, like muscular pain, in my perineal area during and after ejaculation; sometimes burning in the urethra and sometimes just a painful twinge. Again, it can be significantly lesser on other occasions and can change depending on how often I'm ejaculating in a given month or week. Ejaculation, from my experience, worsens the symptoms overall.
This all started during a highly stressful period of my life, back in 2016, not long after I had graduated from university and before I acquired a training contract with a corporate law firm. In this interim phase, I found myself in a state of "depression" as I worried about my future and applied for various posts with little-to-no luck. I had graduated university with a first-class degree but did not have a job immediately to go into after my studies finished. Other people I knew did and so as I sat in my parents' house over the Summer and Autumn of 2016, I became deeply distressed about my life and where I was going. I suppose it was an early-to-mid-twenties "life crisis".
At the same time, I became preoccupied with my image ( i.e. fitness, physique), probably because I had so much time on my hands, and felt sort of isolated now that I had nothing to occupy myself with now that my studies had concluded.
For years, I had suffered from bouts of social anxiety. I'm very confident at interviews and when delivering public speeches but have always had few consistent friendships. I tend to befriend people for a while and then become distant. In 2015-2016, I had reached a low ebb because I was no longer at university. I felt alone and knew that many of my peers were progressing with their lives whereas I felt myself stuck in a rut.
For some reason, I had started to blame masturbation for my social anxieties - as a convenient scapegoat for my problems - after reading articles online by a community known as NoFap. I took thereafter to quitting masturbation entirely in late 2015-2016, believing that it would help me. Obviously, I was deeply wrong. This entire obsession had seemed to cause me deeper anxiety and fixation. To this day, I feel that it cannot be a coincidence that I ended with pain in the penile, perineal and anal area - i.e. prostate area - given my months of believing that ejaculation/masturbation was helping to make me socially anxious.
In early 2016, I had finally got an interview for a big corporate law firm and was preparing for a mock interview when, in early February one night after a mock phone interview, I suddenly felt an agonizing jolt of pain in my petroleum, extending right down to my penis and testicles. A day or two later, I developed burning while urinating. I then came down, through bad luck, with a very bad flu type illness that floored me for two weeks.
After recovering from that illness, the symptoms returned with vengeance - just in time for my big interview with the law firm. Despite the pain, I successfully completed the interview and a few weeks later received a training contract to begin in March 2018 after I completed two courses required undertake it.
But I was in no mood to celebrate, given that my health problems were just beginning.
The rest of the year was taken up with me being diagnosed, firstly, with prostatitis and being put on a cocktail of antibiotics. None of them helped my symptoms except for ciprofloxacin, which I was only on for 4 days because it gave me an adverse reaction involving tendon damage in my legs. For some reason, my pelvic symptoms vanished for 2 - 3 months after this - the only real "break" I've had over the last two years - while I focused on my sore, damaged legs.
I thought at the time that this was me out of the woods but no, after a cold virus hit me around August-September 2016, the pelvic symptoms returned and I've had them ever since.
By this time I was at my third urologist and he diagnosed me with chronic pelvic pain syndrome.
In February 2017, a physiotherapist diagnosed me with pudendal neuralgia after a digital rectal exam in which I felt the shooting pain after him touching a certain area, which he identified with the pudendal nerve.
This diagnosis made me feel even worse after reading the PudendalHope forums and learning about "permanent nerve damage" and what-not. I became terrified to sit down for fear of causing further damage to the nerve. I never returned to the said physio again and a medical professional has not since confirmed or denied his "diagnosis" but the one thing I do know is that it hasn't helped me.
In addition to all of this, I'd been having constipation and hard stools since the onset of the symptoms in 2016 and was determined to fix the problem through diet (I.e. eating more fibre). I've been convinced since late 2016 that my constipation issue, which I've only just largely resolved, had been contributing to my problem or may even have sparked it originally.
And so, I'm now on this forum after reading about TMS and wonder if my symptoms could be due - at least in part - to repressed emotions, of which I've certainly had more than a few in my life. I'm still pursuing "structural" causes and hope to get an MRI scan done in the coming weeks but I feel that the emotional turmoil I went through immediately prior to coming down with the CPPS cannot have been coincidental in hindsight. There must, I think, be a causal link between the two.
If anyone can offer some advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.
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