Brad Levy

I'm a young man who was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma in my mid-30s, and all my doctors now agree that I’m in a durable complete remission. It seems like a million important health conversations happened along the way, but sex and libido were topics that were not proactively discussed with me once during the whole journey. So I’ll be the one to proactively bring up sex now. And to cut to the chase, be prepared for a ton of misalignment between the patient and their partner. My only advice is that vulnerable and consistent communication is key, along with compassion (including yourself).

Sex can be many things. Sex can be bonding and connecting. Sex can relieve stress. Sex is fun. And with cancer being one of the most emotionally stressful times that can befall a relationship, it would have been amazing if sex could have achieved all of those things for me. But news flash, chemo sucks. I was exhausted in ways I had never experienced before and could not fully articulate. I was nauseous. I was bald. I was in chronic pain from how the tumors had compressed parts of my body. And absolutely none of that made me feel sexy.

My wife was on a completely different wavelength. My cancer was just the latest in a string of bad circumstances that hit our family over the previous couple years. Looking back, I think she was using sex to take herself out of the dumpster fire that was life, and I cannot blame her. I remember chatting on the phone with an old friend one day towards the end of my treatment and she asked me “when’s the last time you had really great sex with your wife?”. I honestly couldn’t remember and said it must have been around 6 months. My friend simply said, “wow, I’d be going nuts needing to get laid.”

I’ll admit, up to that point I had not really considered that aspect. I was so preoccupied with how the treatment and journey were affecting my body, my energy, and my emotions. I thought often about the impact of my lymphoma on my wife but those thoughts centered around the stress of her solo parenting our pre-school aged kids and the mechanics of keeping the family functioning each day (during COVID nonetheless). I felt deep guilt that she was catapulted into the middle of all this burden.

My friend’s simple comment around going without sex made that guilt even more intense. I remember one day my wife woke me up from a nap by initiating oral sex. This is beyond exciting for most men but in that moment, I felt completely devoid of sexual desire and I just started crying over the misalignment. I felt guilty, embarrassed, and ashamed, and I did not know how to talk about it.

Shortly after I was with my hematologist and broached the subject of sexual health. I asked if it was possible to get prescribed medication for erectile dysfunction to help reawaken my libido. He said he was ok with that but had never prescribed it. I found myself questioning why this was so unique to me. Was it because I was half the age of most lymphoma patients? Did other men not feel this way? Did other men just not talk about it? My Hematologist also said that the aggressive chemo I was on often made women stop menstruating and he wasn’t surprised there would be an impact on a man’s sexual health. Upon hearing that, I thought to myself “hmmm, I

wish someone had told me that at the beginning of all this”. Then I started researching the sexual health side effects of the other supportive medications I was on, and was again dismayed at how commonly there are negative impacts and how no one ever talked about it with me proactively.

Doctors were quick to agree there were sexual consequences of medications when I brought it up, but why was it up to me? And how many others are too shy or disempowered to talk about it, and think they are all alone with these issues? Despite all the initial thoughts, I have to say that in retrospect, the erectile dysfunction pills were an important (temporary) part of my overall recovery that helped me regain a sense of confident masculinity that had been stripped away by so much that happened from diagnosis onward.

In writing all this, I checked in with my wife for her reflections now that we are years past crisis mode. She agreed that re-establishing our sexual chemistry is an important piece in the constellation of everything that constitutes not just my recovery, but our recovery. We did it together (still continue to, really). It’s not a fairytale along the way. It can be clunky, awkward, and frustrating at times, and takes way longer to improve than you want it to. But now that the storm has been weathered and life is sunnier, our connection and bond are stronger than before. It takes love, patience, compassion, effort, and maybe above all else, honesty.