Brisbane Mazda

I had a nasty experience this week that lead to me ending up at the emergency ward of the local hospital. It is an embarrassing story, but an interesting story none the less.

I usually ride a bicycle to work and this particular day I had worn nylon swimming shorts instead of my normal bike shorts. These swimming shorts are the type that are lined with a white, mesh-type fabric.

To cut a long story short, I had a skin tag on the bottom of my scrotum about the size of a match head. It had been there for years and didn’t cause any discomfort so I had done nothing about it.

Unfortunately, during my ride home this skin tag had worked its way into a hole in the mesh lining of my swim shorts.

I was about to have a shower and pulled my shorts down. The next thing I know there’s blood all over the bathroom floor and a sharp pain in my crotch.

You guessed it, when I pulled my shorts down I ripped off the skin tag and about 2 cm of skin from my scrotum with it.

I had no idea that scrotums could bleed so much. In a calm, but shaky voice, I called my wife to come and help me.

Fighting back nausea from the sight of so much blood, she did a great job of patching me up using folded tissue and band aids.

I then waddled down the street to the local private hospital’s emergency department.

I told the triage nurse about my wound and asked for some stitches.

She asked me how it happened and in return I smiled a sick grin and asked her “do you really want to know?”

She paused for a few seconds and shaking her head said that she didn’t really want to. Trying to fight back giggles, she got me in to see the doctor.

He was very casual and professional about the whole story and suggested we try a special medical superglue. Holding the edges of the wound together he applied a bead of glue to the wound and held it together for about 30 seconds. The glue stung like hell, the gluing was even more painful than the initial injury.

He told me to wear jockey shorts for the rest of the week and that the glue would eventually drop off in a few days.

He was right. There was no swelling, no inflammation, and no pain. After three days I was back on the bike as good as new.

It cost me $250 for the treatment and I was in and out in 50 minutes. Medicare will pay all but $150 of it. I could have gone to the local public hospital but I didn’t feel like waiting for 7 hours just to have some overworked intern stitch me up in a very delicate place.

I’ll be wearing proper bike shorts from now on.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Interesting Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.