"What you're dealing with isn't just aging," Dr. Reynolds said.
He pulled up a simple diagram on his screen and turned it toward me.
"It's a compression problem. And almost no one is talking about it."
He pointed to a small gland sitting right next to a cluster of nerves.
"This is your prostate. And this," he traced the nerve bundle running alongside it, "is the pathway that carries every arousal signal from your brain to your penis."
He kept going.
"When your prostate swells, it presses directly against those nerves. The signal your brain sends gets weaker. Distorted. By the time it arrives, it's not strong enough to do its job."
"So the erection problems aren't starting in the penis?" I asked.
"No. They're starting here." He tapped the prostate on the diagram. "And every month the swelling continues, the signal gets quieter."
I sat back in my chair.
Two years of declining erections. Six months on pills that kept needing higher doses. And no one had ever shown me this.
"So what fixes it?" I asked.
He paused.
"That's the part the system isn't built to tell you."