A radical prostatectomy will have shortened your urethra by about the height of your prostate, and that means you will probably have a shorter erection by up to that amount. You probably shouldn't be trying to pull an erection the same length it used to be - you may be tugging too hard on the new connection between urethra and bladder, and you might burst a blood vessel in the penis with too high a vacuum.
The pump is to make sure you are still achieving regular erections even when you can't get them naturally, because failure to have erections for a long time will result in further penis shortening when natural erections eventually recover, see https://community.prostatecanceruk.org/posts/t21301-Penis-size#post216227 (although I originally wrote it for hormone therapy, it applies to the recovery period from surgery too). It is not required to orgasm to get this protection, just to get hard.
Not sure what you mean by "some progress"...
The pump should enable you to achieve an erection when the nerves aren't working at all, or when they aren't fully recovered, so you should be able to get an erection inside the pump immediately (but don't - wait until surgeon says it's OK, or you might damage the surgery sites).
I don't think the pump will do anything to make recovery of natural erections happen faster. That's down to the nerves healing. "some progress" here would be detecting the slight beginning of extra blood in the penis when aroused without the use of a pump. That varies enormously - I was talking with a guy yesterday who's seeing this after 4 weeks (which is very fast), but some others here have said it took them up to 2 years.
If you are looking to use the pump so you can have intercourse, that's a bit different and requires the use of a cock-ring to maintain the erection after you remove the pump.
I would share Lyn's concern above about vibrations from a powerful medical vibrator possibly causing more damage, certainly in the early days, and I don't see how it could help nerve recovery. The frequency is more than 10 times higher than you can do with a handjob. If you want to try it for pleasurable reasons such as to try and achieve orgasm and your surgeon says OK, that's fine.
Edited by member 16 May 2019 at 12:36
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