Gentlemen and other penis owners, shield your eyes. The following may be too grotesque for your delicate sensibilities.

It turns out that the boner is just another bone that can be broken.

Scrub, Rinse, Repeat is the blog of prostate surgeon Arnon Krongrad. The good Dr. Krongrad has quite a knack for describing awkward injuries in gory analogy.

By the time I strolled into the emergency department, the young man's member had come to resemble a hybridized sausage having the shiny, soft capsule of a fine Wisconsin bratwurst and the puffy corpus and purple coloration of a morcilla fresh from the Pampas.

Oof. That kind of makes me squirm. The problem is known as "penile fracture" and it tends to happen—as it did to Dr. Krongrad's patient—during sex.

Basic gist: Erect penis gets bent in a way erect penises were not meant to bend, tearing membranes in the shaft and allowing the blood that normally does the job of erecting to leak out into other tissues. Sadly, that was not this particular guy's only problem.

The man shared that upon emptying his bladder, his penis swelled. It does not take a master diagnostician to deduce that in addition to the banal rip of his corpus he had an exceptional tear of his urethra: He was peeing into his shaft. Hence, the Pillsbury penis.

The good news: It's fixable. The bad news: It's penis surgery. In the case of Dr. Krongrad's patient—four hours of surgery involving something called "penile degloving". Nobody knows how common broken penis syndrome is, but one doctor interviewed by Scientific American reported seeing a couple of cases a month. The lesson for penis owners everywhere: Be careful in there.

Scrub, Rinse, Repeat: How's it Hangin'?



Scientific American: Ouch! Can You Really Break Your Penis?

(Via Ivan Oransky)

Image: Some rights reserved by Amanda M Hatfield