Recovering Intimacy After Prostate Surgery: Restoring Libido & Sexual Health

Although the prostate gland itself has no direct bearing on your ability to achieve an erection, there is an important series of nerves surrounding the prostate that may be damaged during surgery.
If you find that surgery has adversely affected your libido, there are measures you can take to restore your sex life.

Things You'll Need

• Doctor's appointment

Show More

Instructions

Increasing Libido

• 1

  Relax. It is entirely possible that you have fitted yourself with a mental block surrounding the traumatic event of surgery. This is normal, and it will take time to recover emotionally. Before resorting to any external procedures to increase libido, consider influencing factors in your environment to create a mood conducive to sexuality. Buy your partner an attractive outfit and ask her to engage in activities that you found pleasurable prior to the operation. According to an article from Johns Hopkins, depression is most often the cause of diminished libido after surgery. So create an environment that is sexually charged.

• 2

  Consider medications to help facilitate an erection. Your doctor will likely be more than willing to prescribe either Viagra or Cialis. Although you should not rely on these pills as a long-term solution, if your loss of libido is truly caused by depression, having some assistance will help. Just remember to wean yourself from the medication as soon as possible, lest you develop a psychological reliance on the pills.

• 3

  Think about other treatment options if you determine that the reason for your loss in libido is physical, rather than psychological. Treatment options are the use of erection-inducing injections, vacuum pumps and prosthetic devices implanted into the penis. Although these are hardly optimal solutions, they are worth considering if you have tried everything else to no avail.