Back
in 1993 I printed this story out and put it up in a shop window where
it attracted a crowd of people who stood there in the street reading it!
Ten years on I
used it again in one of my first blog posts, and since then it has
become a strange ritual that each time I start a new blog, I add this
story, because it just wouldn't feel like a real blog without including
it. This still cracks me up.
AN UNUSUAL CASE – by William A. Morton, Jr, MD (From an actual medical journal)
One morning I was called to the emergency room
by the head ER nurse. She directed me to a patient who had refused to
describe his problem other than to say that he “needed a doctor who took
care of men’s troubles.” The patient, about 40, was pale. febrile, and
obviously uncomfortable, and had little to say as he gingerly opened his
trousers to expose a bit of angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.
After I asked the nurse to leave us, the patient permitted me to remove
his trousers, shorts, and two or three yards of foul-smelling stained
gauze wrapped around his scrotum, which was swollen to twice the size of
a grapefruit and extremely tender.
A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and
blood, extended down the left scrotum. Amid the matted hair, edematous
skin, and various exudates, I saw some half-buried dark linear objects
and asked the patient what they were. Several days earlier, he replied,
he had injured himself in the machine shop where he worked and had
closed the laceration himself with a heavy duty stapling gun. The dark
objects were one-inch staples of the type used in putting up wallboard.
We x-rayed the patient’s scrotum to locate the staples; admitted him to
the hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, broad-spectrum
antibacterial therapy, and hexaclorophrene sitz baths prior to surgery
the next morning.
The procedure consisted of exploration and
debridement of the left side of the scrotal pouch. Eight rusty staples
were retrieved, and the skin edges were trimmed and freshened. The left
testis had been avulsed and was missing. The stump of the spermatie cord
was recovered at the inguinal canal, debrided, and the vessels lifated
properly, though not much of a hematoma was present. Through-and-through
Penrose drains were sutured loosely in site, and the skin was loosely
closed. Convalescence was uneventful, and before his release from the
hospital a week later, the patient confided the rest of his tory to me.
An unmarried loner, he usually didn’t leave
the machine shop at lunchtime with his coworkers. Finding himself alone,
he began the regular practice of masturbating by holding his penis
against the canvas drive-belt of a large floor-based piece of running
machinery. One day, as he approached orgasm, he lost his concentration
and leaned too close to the belt. When his scrotum suddenly became
caught between the pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into
the air and landed a few feet away. Unaware that he had lost his left
testis, and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the wound
close and resumed his work. I can only assume he abandoned this method
of self-gratification.
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