The cringe-worthy story of how I was diagnosed with genital psoriasis

The story of how I was diagnosed with genital psoriasis is a tale of mystery and adventure, a quest filled with juvenile confusion and dangerously high levels of awkwardness. In the winter after I turned 21, I started to find dead skin on my underwear. Every time I would notice more and more accumulating there, along with increasing itchiness in the area of my perineum where that skin was coming from. Since the region was not visible to my eye, I never noticed the patch of red, irritated skin I had there, but after putting up with the discomfort for a while I figured it was time to do something about it. I pluck up the courage and, with this symptom under my belt, went to my first doctor ready to face the awkwardness. Because the problem was located in the genital area, I figured the right doctor to see was a urologist. I felt a bit anxious coming to the appointment. I guess most people wouldn’t be thrilled either by the idea of having their genitals examined, but bear in mind that, back then, I was a 21-year-old virgin with no sexual experience of any kind. My penis had remained concealed for many years, kept secret like the Ark of the Covenant waiting for an Indiana Jones to discover it. I had always pictured someone a bit different to show my penis to for the first time, but I guess a short-winded, 60-year-old doctor with tired analytical eyes and a shaky hand would have to do. He asked me to drop my pants and lie down, and instructed me to move my penis right and left like a joystick, then my testicles, in order to expose the whole affected area. As I stood back up, pulling up my pants, my face still red from the embarrassment, he passed a disappointing sentence. “This is a skin problem, I can’t really help you with that. You should see a dermatologist”. Like a teenage girl with daddy issues, I had given away my flower to the wrong guy. Later that day I looked for a dermatologist and made the second of a large list of doctor appointments. Soon after I went to the dermatologist. The fact that it was the second time going through such a process made it only slightly less awkward. He prescribed some lotions for me and scheduled a second visit the following week. The lotions didn’t do anything, so on my second visit he took another look at it and wrote me a prescription for a new lotion. Seven days later my skin is the same, and I’m walking to my third appointment with this guy wondering whether he is really just a creep that’s writing me prescriptions for placebo to get to see my dick every week. So I’m there, pants down, exposing my privates once again, and this time the doctor notices a new patch of dry skin a bit further up, on the base of my penis. He takes a sample of the skin there to get it sent to the laboratory, and it turns out to be a genital wart. -------------------------- To this day, it remains a complete mystery how the hell I got an STD despite being a virgin. Everything I read about genital warts tells me they are caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) and transmitted through close genital contact. Although this can technically mean you can contract the virus while being a virgin, it implies that you must have had at least some sort of sexual experience where you came in close contact with somebody else’s genitals. That had definitely not been my case. Back then, I had the black belt in virginity. I hadn’t even kissed a girl before, much less been anywhere near a vagina. That genital wart was the fetus of Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb — a true miracle. My dermatologist sent me to the surgeon to get the wart removed. Things were escalating really quickly. My dad, whom I had been forced to update on the whole predicament when things started getting serious, drove me to the hospital on the day of the surgery. They made me wear one of those smocks that tie up in the front and exposes your ass and carried me on a stretcher to the operating theater. Everything looked like the medical shows I would watch on TV. I laid there face up, slightly blinded by the big round flashlights directly above me, with doctors showing up in my field of vision as they hovered around getting the equipment ready. My penis, always a secondary actor in my life — if not just an extra — was finally having its breakthrough. It was the center of everyone’s attention, it had all the spotlights on it. Get ready buddy, the cameras are rolling, it’s your time to shine! The medical team gathered around me, prepared to start, and I felt a sharp pain as they punctured my penis to administer local anesthesia — the only thing I would feel throughout the whole operation. I decided that, since the surgery was not very complex and I had been left awake, I might as well try to enjoy the experience. It certainly was a unique situation, having the surgeon and his nurses work diligently on my private parts as I laid there witnessing the whole thing (or, rather, as much of it as my position allowed me to). The show did not last very long though, and soon I found myself back into the changing room, carefully putting my pants on as I tried not to touch much the muddle of bandages that was now my penis. The post-operative was not fun. When I removed the dressing, the whole area down there was a beach in Normandy on June 7th, 1944. A bunch of bloody, amorphous meat with colors ranging from flesh tones, to yellowish, to red and purple. My swollen penis looked like the face of Rocky Balboa after the fight with Apollo Creed. It was a truly sad picture. I felt sorry for it, as God knows I had not given it many satisfactions in my life and it seemed like suffering was all it knew. I was glad to see it recover quickly though — in just three or four days, it finally resembled the shape of a penis again, and I could take a pee without my heart breaking for the sight of it alone. -------------------------- The problem was that, of course, that wasn't the end of the story. In focusing on the miraculous discovery of the genital wart, everybody had forgotten about the issue that got me to the doctor in the first place. But I for sure had not, as my testicles/perineum area was still pretty dry and itchy. Wary of my first dermatologist, who had only been taking shots in the dark until he stumbled upon the wart, I decided to try with a new one. This second dermatologist aimed in the right direction surprisingly quickly. He wanted to know whether there was any history of psoriasis in my family — and after asking my father we found out that my grandad used to suffer from it. He checked my nails and saw their thickness and the tiny dents on them. He recognized that the genital wart had just been an unrelated incident, and was pretty certain about what my real diagnosis was. After four doctors, near ten examinations of my genitals, a surgery, and a lot of time and emotional distress, I finally got my answer: I suffered from genital psoriasis. -------------------------- Nowadays, my life as a man with genital psoriasis is not very different from what it would be without the condition. I have a few patches of psoriasis that get worse periodically, and a set of lotions to bring them back to a better state, and that’s about the scope of the disease for me. It has occasionally inconvenienced me but generally not hurt my sex life significantly, or my general well-being for that matter. During all these years since I was diagnosed, I have familiarized myself with my psoriasis and learned about it. I am aware now of the strong psychological aspect of this disease, and I have come to understand better where it comes from for me personally, and in what conditions it intensifies and diminishes. While it is something that I will always have to live with, I now see how being more in tune with myself and my body can help me deal with my genital psoriasis better. Looking back, I see a young boy that was frightened, insecure, forced by a disease to make vulnerable precisely the part of him that he cherished the least and zealously concealed the most. My struggles towards a correct diagnosis turned out to be only a tough beginning to a longer path of self-discovery that would eventually bring to the surface many of my self-esteem issues and my problems with intimacy, sex, and porn. But, as they say, that's another story for another time.