Hello,
I've never written anything here or on the other forum before as I struggle to talk about it and am quite shy, but I wanted to introduce myself mainly to thank you all for everything you've all done.
To quickly describe myself I'm 23 and I developed pois at the age of 16 (I suffer from cognitive symptoms) but I didn't understand what was happening or make the connection between my symptoms and ejaculation. Very slowly I eventually started to make the connection and I finally discovered that other people have this illness when I found the other forum over two years ago.
Thanks to the work of everyone involved in the forum I was able to learn about pois and to try and manage its impact by preventing symptoms on days when I had a lot on (this definitely benefited both my university work and social life). I also gained hugely by learning about the supplements that have been beneficial; I take fenugreek, gingseng, ginkgo, CoQ10, niacin and recently added vitamin b complex thanks due to the discovery by kurtosis).
Importantly I also learnt about the ways that pois has similarly impacted on other people's lives, which was unbelievably helpful in confirming the difficulty that it has created in mine making me feel much more normal and not at fault. Im not brilliant at expressing myself but I will always be incredibly grateful for this.
I have also in the last few days been able to make another big step in my life thanks to you all. Using the description of pois on the website created, articles that demo kindly emailed me a long time ago, and the fantastic descriptions of what its like to have pois from the reddit and indiegogo campaign, I was able to tell my mum and her partner about this illness. As quite a private person who has always kept pois a secret this was a big step for me and something that I certainly could not have made without the resources and emotional support I get from reading this forum. They were both incredibly understanding so I just want to say thank you so much for giving me the resources and strength to do this.
I understand that much effort has been undertaken to raise funds for the research through NORD (which if I understood correctly the previous forum annoyingly did not support prompting the switch of many people to this forum, myself included
) and over $13000 has been raised which is fantastic. My family have helped me donate $80 this evening, although this is less than what some have donated I do hope it helps and we will definitely donate again soon. (We did get a confirmation email but please do contact me if for whatever reason this donation has not gone through)
This is definitely more of an essay than I meant it to be lol, so I will quickly end with saying thank you again to everyone for everything you've done, and although I'd certainly not intend to downplay the huge influence that other people have made, I would like to say a special thank you to demo and daveman who have worked tirelessly for years in getting this forum and the awareness of pois to where it is today. On a personal note the kindness and understanding that you two have both shown when talking about pois has meant a lot to me.
Many thanks
Tom
