JOTAPE_CHILE?s POIS summary
Hello everyone,
My name is Juan Pablo Lewin, from Santiago, Chile.
My POIS symptoms started at around the age of 13, but I can?t remember when exactly. I am now 43 years old, and being dealing with this condition for 30 years already.
My POIS hits very hard, but lasts only two days. Mainly I suffer from irritability, fatigue, headaches, cold sweating, cold and hot rashes, muscle aches, depressed mood, social phobia, photofobia, dry skin, anxiety, stress and physical effort intolerance and generalized malaise. The symptoms disappear after two night sleep, but would come back if I have an orgasm, by sex, masturbation or nocturnal emissions.
At first I thought my symptoms were normal. I thought everybody felt the same, but when I realized this could not be possible, I hid it. I never talked about it until I was 21, when I spoke with my then girlfriend with which I started my sex life, and then I talked to my parents, who helped me go into therapy, since it was thought this was purely mental, after no anormal situation came up in exams.
I started explaining this POIS situation with no success to psicologysts and then psychiatrists, when one suggested this could be an anxiety problem. This was back in 2003, and I started taking a combination of 2 mg of clonazepam, 20 mg of escitalopram and 3 mg of risperidone. This combination prevented me of having nocturnal emissions and gave some sort of control over the issue, but were innefective when actually having an orgasm after sex or masturbating. I took those pills for 20 years.
In 2007 I came to know POIS was a condition that more people were suffering. Until then, 26 years old, I thought it was only me suffering symptoms after orgasm. After this I tried a couple of methods posted in the forum in 2012, such as niacin and desensitization. Niacin worked once, but then it would not work again; desensitization program made me feel sick with POIS symptoms after the 5th or 6th session, and had to abandon due to work related problems. In 2023 I started taking vitamin D and magnesium, which aliviated the cold and hot rashes. That has been my only improvement in this whole time.
I stayed with my three pills, which gave some control over my life until 2023, when they stopped working. I would get the POIS symptoms after dreaming with an ejaculation or orgasm. I am totally abstaining from sex since 2018, so dreams are the way my POIS comes up. I started having spontaneous symptoms for two days after dreaming with an orgasm, without having actually having an ejaculation. This has totally affected my life, socially, emotionally and at work and family.
Since my pills were not working to prevent me from having dreams that resulted in POIS, I decided to end taking them, as I thought I was only taking them because of my addiction to them. It has been a year and have totally abandoned my dependence on clonazepam. Escitalopram and risperidone are next, and when I am done with them I am willing to try some new methods posted here and on scientific publications.
POIS has had a very high toll on my life, and currently I am struggling with these dreams that hurt me the most, because I lost control over my life. I can control my sex and masturbation, but dreams are more difficult to handle. I am now on the process of abandoning those pills to then start a new phase in my search of a cure. I don?t know where to start exactly, but I think I am on the right path this time.
Thanks for reading,
Juan Pablo Lewin
JP
