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The patient arrived at the emergency department north of Toronto with an unusual, somewhat embarrassing, complaint.

His penis had swollen to such an extent that it looked to the physician examining him like he had a third testicle on top of the other two.

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But as soon as Dr. Raj Waghmare touched his patient’s puffed-up foreskin, he knew what was wrong.

“It crackled and popped, as if Rice Krispies were tucked inside,” the emergency-department physician drolly recounted later, admitting he had never seen anything quite like it.

The case is one of the most bizarre on The Overhead Page, Waghmare’s fascinating blog cataloguing odd, tragic and infuriating stories from his long career as an emergency specialist.

It crackled and popped, as if Rice Krispies were tucked inside

When physicians write about medicine, it’s typically in the form of academic reports long on scientific precision and short on actual readability.

Waghmare’s tales from the ER are a rarity — composed like short stories, jargon kept to a minimum, the suspense building until readers discover the diagnosis — and the patient’s fate.