A therapist could save your life

The phone rang for the fifth time. I could not ignore it anymore. Persistent calls to a doctor could mean a severe emergency and ignoring a call could cost a life.

However I was driving, caught up in a nasty traffic jam. There was no way to park by the road to answer the call so I went ahead to receive it while driving and put it on speaker phone.

“Doctor, my man is evolving into a woman, I am serious,” came the voice. “He stopped having sex months ago. Now he is developing breasts and he is lactating. You just have to help me. I am scared; I don’t know what will follow next!”

It was Mary, a lady I had met many years ago in the antenatal clinic while she was expecting her first baby. I saw her severally at the clinic thereafter until she delivered. It had been a while since we talked. I asked her to bring her husband to the clinic the following day. They were at the clinic at 7am.

The couple had not had sex for close to a year. Problems started when Tom developed premature ejaculation. He did not seek help hoping that things would normalise in due course. Then his erections also started dwindling. After a while, he totally lost them.

“However hard I tried he just remained down, flabby, flat,” explained Mary. “Many times I was upset. I felt rejected and unloved.”

Tom, Mary’s husband, was deep in thought. Sex problems are normally difficult for couples and I could imagine the difficulty they had gone through. In instances like this, the man feels helpless and inadequate. His ego crashes and all aspects of life – professional development, investment, etc – can suddenly collapse, because the wellbeing of a man is closely tied to his sexual abilities.

“At first I thought he was cheating on me,” Mary continued. “I hired people to spy on him but they found nothing!”

“You actually did that? I don’t believe this,” Tom blurted.

“Sorry I never told you this but I just could not understand why you could not rise to the occasion,” Mary shouted back in self-defence.

HAD TO INTERVENE

I had to intervene to calm their emotions. I explained that in our communities a lot of people have sex problems but unfortunately, we are cultured not to talk about them. People suffer in silence and are always suspicious of each other when these problems happen. The reason many marriages break is not because the sex problem is so bad that it cannot be corrected but because it causes the couple to mistrust each other.

“Yes, I really did not know what was happening to me and I did not know where to seek help,” Tom explained. But the growth of Tom’s breasts was the stroke that broke the camel’s back. Mary could no longer hide her apprehension, especially when the breasts started discharging milk. It led her to make the frantic calls to me.

I examined Tom, and yes, the main abnormality was big, lactating breasts. Tests showed that Tom had high levels of prolactin, a hormone that is normally only found in trace amounts in males but which is excreted in large amounts in lactating women to stimulate breast growth and milk let down. In high amounts, the hormone is known to knock out sexual function.

Further tests showed that Tom had a tumour in the brain, of the pituitary gland found in the base of the brain. This was unfortunate. Brain tumours are not easy to treat and could disable Tom’s life completely.

We immediately involved a neurosurgeon. The verdict was that he had to undergo brain surgery. A few days later Tom was admitted for surgery. After six hours of operation, he was admitted to the ICU. It was two weeks before he left hospital to recuperate at home.

Tom’s story was yet another reminder that sex problems are not to be taken for granted. With the rise in cases of diabetes, heart problems, kidney problems and other chronic illnesses, a sex problem could signify any disease. Run for your life to the nearest sexual medicine expert for a full check-up whenever sex fails.