Living in the past

[Erik]

How have you tried to come to terms with what has happened to you? I am filled with so much regret and play scenarios in my head in which I didn’t take this poison. I came very close not to and could have been saved. It pains me so much when I read about others who decided against taking it. At the time, I had no idea about PFS. I was completely oblivious. I had no idea something so destructive could be sold in such a cavalier and careless manner.

How do you look to the future when living with this horror?

[mstone]

I don’t. Drugs help muffle the regret and the looping ‘how could this have gone different’ scenarios but they don’t provide solid ground for a future.

And a flip side of this, I find it very stressful when people from my past check in. What do you even say…they’re expecting some pleasant life update. Really underscores what a living death this is.

[Exsexgod]

Thank you for that post.

So I m not alone with this thoughts. I know that from other victims. And it’s good to talk about it. Cause nobody is alone with his desperation and regret.

After all it’s a normal post traumatic reaction to repress harmful thoughts over the new reality.

And I think you are not self-pity, you are very active to fight PFS and going to join the awareness campaign.

It’s my day from standing up at midday till I lay down in front of the TV at half past six in the evening.

And a total crowd of psychiatric ward therapists, social workers, Privat PFS groups try to bring me back to the reality of today and to fight this disease.

I’m in an endless circle for more than a year:

Why I took the pills with me after I denied already and doctor said than better not.
Why he handed the pharma muster packages out to me.
Why I couldn’t say NO.
Why I didn’t get agressiv, than like I do when I see road hoogs behind my car.
Why I didn’t ask another urologist for a second opinion.
Why I didn’t ask myself, if my prostate needed that already.
Why I stored this shit over a year without checking the internet.
Why I started the pills at an emotional exhausted evening.
Why I didn’t stop early after the first symptoms. Maybe I didn’t get PFS than.
Why I didn’t talk about this crazy storing the pills with my psychiatrist.
Why I didn’t talk about it was sexual to much for a sixty year old man with an enlarged prostate.
Why I looked for sexual active affairs instead of a partnership without so much sexuality, but with a deeper inner relationship for going old together.
Why I let myself gaslighting by the criminal slight an misunderstanding leaflet.
Why I left my child and her mother alone a decade before. And denied a family life.
Why I was so obsessed of sex instead of looking for a tantric partnership with inner connection.
Why I was so uncarefull with my body and health.

Now I m walking up and down with the same thoughts every day. Disconnected from the entire world.

[Ultra]

I have the same feelings about it. I have been suffering from my wrong choices in life for quite some time already. But I had a lot hopes for the future too. I had some very appealing images of my possible future life and had enogh energy to pursue those dreams. But this shitty condition became the culmination of my personal crisis and ruined a lot of my plans.
I thought a lot of how to accept what happened to me. And in fact, I couldn’t do that. I keep going on thinking that probably one day it’ll be over or at least I will find a way to live more-or-less normal life.

[Wintermoon]

I try to live as if I weren’t affected, but of course there are moments where I can’t deny it. During bad moments especially I also think “What if I had never taken the drug?”

Ultimately, I think it doesn’t help much musing about that scenario because it is the way it is. It only brings sadness, regret and yearning for something that is out of reach, either completely, or for a very long time to come. So regardless I have to make the best out of the situation.

What helps me is that I tell myself that I might be idealizing what my life would have been like without the drug. I think it’s easy to imagine it being perfect in a way.

I know this sounds weird but maybe there is some value to the life lessons I’ve learned from this. That health is precious and life is short. That being vain and reckless in general can have serious consequences for yourself and also the ones close to you. That ‘clinically trialed’ medicine is not as safe for people as I always thought it was.
Maybe this situation has taught me to love the little things in life more, whereas otherwise I might have overlooked or underappreciated them.

While I’ve always known that life is finite, I always lived like the end was very far away. Maybe the confrontation that health and life aren’t forever in a more direct way has spurred more action in me and I seize the day more often and live my life and treat others in a more valuable way.

But I just wished that this ‘life-changing and scary experience’ wouldn’t last forever and that I could have learned the lesson without the constant reminder.

[Exsexgod]

For me PFS means I have to go old without a partnership, without a family, total alone, because of the loss of my sexual and entire intellectual and emotional abilities.

A fat weird bum with dark cycles under his eyes. If my child doesn’t visit me at the weekend, I hang alone 24/7 in my house.

Maybe I’m older as the average here but the pain I suffer day by day, hour for hour is the same.

And we elder 50 + ones with PFS from proscar against BPH are rare cases in rare disease. The chance getting Mercks jackpot was even much lower for us.

And that’s why I go into the regret for my mistakes and let the way into the PFS catastrophe pass by I acted with the intellectual development of a four year old child. In my phantasy I act as a normal adult in my past and prohibit the way into the catastrophe.

Staying alone haven’t been a problem for me all the time of my life before.
Thousands of sports, activities, Hobbies and many friends I could visit. I lost the ability for my work, financial Organisation and the fun of doing it all.

So now I lay in bed only to face half the day, chat the forums, try to sleep, doing nothing.

My day is than walking up and down and think about the past and being in regret. Yes I am. I can’t forget how I get in it like the greatest fool of the entire patient community.

It leads to nothing. I know well.

I try to rearrange my post PFS crash life. I try to visit friends. Try to make a coffee plate or an grill party evening. But after all it’s to much for me and I’m afraid that old friends and fiance see me in this state now.

I know guys from my privat PFS group, who live a normal life. Working, traveling, living something like a normal life. They fought the pain. And they fight the pain. I need hope and time to come there

@Wintermoon told his experience " I know
this sounds weird but maybe there is some value to the life lessons I’ve learned from this. "

It sounds hard. I had to learn about my life too, as a fool at the tarot card, but why we. Others live without any lesson for a foolish life and get 86 without pain. Why we???

What about them, who call me self pitty, how do you live your life. What are your thoughts.

[JimWildman]

I wrote the following elsewhere, but I feel it fits here better:

"…How much time do any of us have ahead of us?

For most, a full lifetime of misery and pain with faint hopes of recovery awaits… No one actually dies from PFS itself, so all the tomorrows become a sorrowful distressing existence, a life sentence of self-hatred for taking that poison.

Others refuse to accept that prison and take the only shortcut… and we mourn their decision. Time. A blessing or a curse? Jim…"

[Exsexgod]

“…so all the tomorrows become a sorrowful distressing existence, a life sentence of self-hatred for taking that poison.”

So today is the birthday of a former fiance. Normally they all sit together in the garden buzzing heavy redwine…

Now I’m ashamed to go there. I can only talk about pain and regret and I really look old and sick. With my dark cycles and wrickles under my eyes, like a cancer patient. To fat for my former masculine sportive clothes.

I want to rearrange my wasted garden, put all the garbage away make me a corner to sit. I really have no power for this I normally had done with a rented transporter in one afternoon. Sweated, dusty, muscles working, feeling like a man.
I have to ask a gardening Service to do that for me. The new garden furniture, they have to bring me.

Maybe I can stand the torture of a hot summer and the burning sun I once loved so much staying in a plastic boat all the day on the little lake than as a 89 yo in the garden chairs, reading a book. Feeling distressed all the time.

And …

For what?!?

“Others refuse to accept that prison and take the only shortcut… and we mourn their decision. Time. A blessing or a curse? Jim…”

[Taw]

Sometimes what is old becomes new again. I’ve been riding the bus lately to go to places I have not been in awhile. Doing this brings back memories. It is a fun way to “live in the past”, a good distraction too.