I dearly hope I'm not wasting any reader's time. I do have points to make.)
OK, so here is more about the second surgery and its aftermath:
When I could bring myself to watch them changed my bandages, I saw that I had been circumcised. At first I didn't realize that they actually had had to use my foreskin in creating my longer urethra. Though I know now that they had to, at the time I thought they had taken more than just very sensitive skin. Until then, manipulating my foreskin had become my most pleasurable means of masturbation. So again, I had new castration thoughts. However, I knew other guys who had been circumcised at birth, and they were considered normal.
At any rate, I felt that I was at least better able to aim urination. They had given me a urethra that opened just below the glans, and some of my remaining frenulum was still there. The next surgery would be for extending my urethra through the glans to the end.
During recovery and for a couple years afterward, other personal and family tragedies occurred, and eventually, I did not have the third step of surgery. I had had enough anyway, and as far as my dad was concerned, I had a fully functional piece of equipment to breed with, and maybe have fun. Subject closed. I'm glad now, and know that the third surgery could have damaged nerves that I have relied on since for pleasure.
This is 55 years later. Medicine, including pediatric microsurgery, research on nerve regeneration, ethics, and psychological support have radically changed from the early forms of treatment for hypospadias.
These days, many parents opt for "hypospadias repair" in newborns. And doctors are eager to do that both for the child's benefit and for their own pocketbooks. I know in my case the surgeries were necessary. I would not be alive now, otherwise.
Even after the surgeries, I thought a lot about suicide. By then, fear was my hidden personna. I could think of no way to prove myself adequate after all.
As the quiet "weirdo," I was a daily target for increasingly violent bullies in high school. I seldom won even a draw in fights against guys who could quickly move out of my range of vision, and was taunted as a coward, a freak, a nut-case, or "Wiggle-Eye" because of my nystagmus.
I couldn't drive, had only primitive conversational skills, no money or job or hope for any. I was only an average student, not wanting to stand out in any way, and perhaps embarrass the bullying "jocks" surrounding me. I didn't play sports, since I couldn't follow the ball and often was hit by the ball I had not seen coming. And where I lived, sport defined status, even of morons..
My father had taught me carefully how to hunt and fish. I was of course not much of a shot, but I got lucky sometimes, and loved the shotgun he gave me.
In those days, I could get home from a stressful school day, pick up my shotgun, step over a fence at the end of my street and disappear into the woods and fields that stretched for miles.
Farmers didn't mind my trespassing, if they ever saw me, so I was free to think, sometimes crying and fantasizing, or simply sitting and listening to nature. Yet I developed the habit also of turning the muzzles toward my face and resting my nervous fingers on the triggers. Probably any disturbance that startled me could end my misery. And I knew it.
Then a life-changer happened. All my life, my parents had told me and I had believed, that my eyes could never improve. They had taken me to a "specialist" in a city when I was only small. Although the man was very old and may have been the best of his kind in the region at one time, he probably answered only my parents' first question--that of whether my nystagmus could be fixed. His answer was "no" or "not at this time". And my parents accepted his word as an opinion that my VISION couldn't improve.
School nurses for years had checked my vision yearly, sending home notes that I might benefit from glasses, but my parents sadly stood by their understanding of what the "specialist" had said. Finally a family friend, an optometrist, pursuaded my folks to let him test me for free and give me glasses at his own expense if it looked as if glasses would work for me. So, we tried it, and it worked!
I still had poor eyesiight, but for the first time, I could see leaves on trees instead of clumps of shadow and color! I could read better and more! I could imagine doing some things I had never hoped to do! That was at age 18, nearing the end of highschool.
But my elation faded with the approach of highschool graduation, knoiwng there were no jobs, other than working part-time with my blue-collar father. Affording college was an impossibility, and the Navy didn't want me. But a teacher asked if I and another loner might be interested in trying jobs advertized in a brochure from a franchise in Yellowstone Natl. Park, 2,000 miles away.
The other guy was as fearful as I was, but we took the chance, and found another life-changer. The place was a natural wonderland, filled with other boys and girls from all over the U.S., all working for ridiculous pay at menial jobs, but given room and board. A key thing for me was that everyone else as young as we were was not allowed to have cars. I was already a practiced hiker. Others joined me. So for the first time in my memory, I had a level social playing field.
Early on, I happened to be the one to rescue another kid from drowning in a frigid river at night. The others had stood by, afraid to enter the fast water. So deserved or not, they called me a "hero" and suddenly I had acquired my first girlfriend for the rest of the summer.
She was very kind, and gave me confidence to lose my virginity. I was an atrocious lover of course, but I'd baptized my once-useless penis in heaven. She never knew about my earlier problems, and a condom always masked my (physical) scars.
At least briefly, I could think of myself as a man, though there was so much more trauma I was too young to predict.
I may not go into as much detail about those later traumas. They were and are a huge influence on my mental and physical health. But they may not belong here. I want instead to discuss some insights I think I've had, still carrying the effects of very early damage. I hope to help both men and women of any age to understand what I think I have learned. I want to offer an "upside" to hope for.
(Whew! Break time again.)
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