Missed Opportunities

I finally made it onto the blog list! Yeah!

I had an interesting interaction yesterday at work.

In the health care fields it is widely understood that healthy young men don't come in to see the Doctor unless something is wrong with their private parts. Of course, that is never listed as the reason for the visit. That is usually "cough", "general physical", "allergies" or some such thing. I have heard of practitioners making bets as to to how many minutes it will take a man to get brave enough to get around to talking about his penis.

So yesterday, as I looked at the empty chart of a mid-twenties-something year old male who had come in for a "physical", I was wondering to myself what the real reason for the visit was.

  His vital signs looked good.  He looked healthy, trim and fit. I asked him, "So, you're just here for a general all around physical exam?" He answered "Yes." I didn't want to waste a lot more time so I asked more pointedly, "Is there anything about which you are particularly worried right now?" He took a deep breath and said " Yeah. Lately I haven't been able to maintain an erection for more than a minute or so. Is that normal?"

I had guessed correctly. Something WAS wrong with his penis. Now there was a time, not very far back, that I would have whipped out my prescription pad and written a prescription for Viagra so fast that you would have had trouble seeing me do it. He would have then been out the door.

Armed with my new-found knowledge of addiction however, I decided to go with a different round of questioning. "Have you been under a lot of stress lately?" And he answered, "Yes, I think so." "So, what do you think has been causing the stress? Job? Are you not getting along with your wife? Or is it something else?" I asked. So he explained to me that his relationship with his wife had been strained. She had even gone so far as to accuse him of cheating on her, which he swore he had never done.

So that gave me the idea to ask him, "Have you been mentally faithful to your wife?" He said, "No." And then I went out on a limb and said, "I have noticed that when I have looked at pornography, that my wife, through some seemingly magical spiritual connection, seems to know right away that something is wrong. Would you happen to have a habit of viewing pornography?" He blushed a little bit, but admitted that yes, he had been viewing quite a lot of it for the past two months, precisely the same amount of time that he had been having trouble with his wife. 

To make a long story short, I then talked to him about many of the things I have learned so far in my recovery. Incredibly, he was VERY open to all of it. He seemed excited about going to his wife and explaining to her what the root of his problem was and that he wanted to get past it by being honest with her and their pastor, and if need be, a 12 step program. I came away from the experience wondering how many other times I could have helped a man and a family with a similar problem if I had only had eyes to see it.