You know you’ve had a bad night when you wake up with a vagina full of tacks. Yes, thumbtacks. And how exactly do you remove tacks from a woman’s vagina? “Very carefully,” says the Montreal-based emergency-room doctor who had to perform this task.
Right. Let me rephrase that: “How the hell does a woman end up with a vagina full of thumbtacks?!”
“She was psychotic and suffers blackouts where she loses consciousness and wakes up with no recollection of how she got wherever she ends up,” the good doctor tells me. In this case, with her vagina full of tacks.
Welcome to Emergency!—though they never showed cases like this on that old show from the ’70s.
The doctor says many of the patients who come in with bizarre sex injuries are often psychotic. Like the Tack Lady.
Or Porcupine Man—a regular who likes to do a lot of cocaine and then play My Penis, The Pincushion. “He comes in with at least 100 needles stuck into the end of his penis.” Apparently, he finds this stimulating, that is until the swelling of his penis wrecks the fun.
For all their pride in their penises, some guys sure have a strange way of showing it, like the guy who decided he’d slash his penis into 10 bacon-slice-like pieces. “It took at least four surgeries to reconstruct it.” The doctor uses pictures of the procedure in lectures to demonstrate the wonders of reconstructive surgery. So just how reconstructive was it? “He could pee again by the time he left. That’s all I saw.”
I don’t think I need to say this but I will: Do not try this at home, kids. Same goes for that needle business.
Not everyone who comes in with sexually related injuries is psychotic. Sometimes they’re just nuts, like the 16-year-old who came in with burns all over the end of his penis. Turns out he had genital warts and was too embarrassed to see a doctor. He’d heard they burn them off, and decided to try it himself. Except they don’t usually use hot knives down at the STI clinic.
“Then there’s your standard dildo retrievals,” the doc continues, “though we did do one unusual vibrator removal on a guy.” It had lodged inside his butt and was still on. They managed to get inside and shut it off, but because it was in backwards they had to surgically remove it from the inside via his bowel.
The doctor’s also seen a few examples of what he calls “missed the hole” injuries. That is, “broken” penises that missed their target during intercourse and slam-dunked themselves right into her pubic bone. (Because there are no bones in it, you can’t technically break your penis, but snapping a hard penis full of blood will cause some nasty bruising). In cases like these, there’s not much a doctor can do. “I give them some pain relief, tell them to stroke it every day, and wait for the bruising to heal.”
Priapism is another common male sexual emergency. “If it stays hard long enough, it can wreck everything and make you unable to ever have an erection again.” Sometimes, the guy is already impotent and the perpetual hard-on is a result of impotency medication working a little too well. In this situation, they give you an injection in the shoulder and if that doesn’t make you go limp, they suck the blood out of your penis with a needle. Fun, eh?
Almost as fun as sticking pipe cleaners in your willy. In this guy’s case, they didn’t get stuck, but pulling a big, fuzzy rod outta your penis can make your urethra very irritated. Another one he’s heard of from colleagues but hasn’t seen is the old “glass rod in the urethra” routine.
Why anyone would want to stick a breakable object—or anything, for that matter—up his urethra is beyond me. Why do these guys do it? They insist it feels good, the doctor tells me. Most guys I know won’t even get swabbed.
Should you find yourself with a dildo stuck up your butt, my source suggests you get a family doctor you trust so you don’t have to go to emergency. But if that option isn’t available to you, rest assured that—as you can see from my source—most emergency doctors have seen it all and won’t be shocked.
