Pain with arousal

[ChrisH]

My wife is into her second year with IC. We rarely have sexual intercourse, which I am perfectly comfortable with. My question revolves around the issue of mutual masturbation and general arousal. My wife and I rarely engage in mutual masturbation because any type of arousal is painful to her. This rules out masturbation as well as romantic touching. It also is affecting her touching me because that causes her to be aroused.

I am looking for suggestions on how to cope with these issues as well as suggestions for painless alternatives.

Background: she has gone through the gammut of treatments including self installations. She will be trying her free sample of CystaQ this weekend.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

[lorihoss]

At times, I don't want to touch my husband either because he gets so aroused that he goes to fast, plus I literally have to self-talk to get myself over the idea that it is going to hurt. So, we have to go really slow. That is hard to even begin to do as we have three kids, we both are teachers, and have very stressful high risk kids. He is in on line classes for adminstration so our time is limited. As I am recently diagnosed, I am just learning my way around that area. Hopefully it will get better for your wife, but know that it may take a while to re-train her brain into not expecting pain. After I had a myomectomy to remove a soccer size balled tumor from my uterus, I had to re-teach my body to not expect pain from sex. It took a while. I am hoping that eventually this will also be the case for me once I get my IC under control.

[lorihoss]

Lucky you! I love it when I feel good. But I noticed on another thread, the discussion of this topic. Check out the forum boards as I can't remember the thread starter. There was a discussion going on about the constant arousal stage. I learned a lot.