The Worst Break of My Life

Maybe you'll get nothing but nylon socks this year for Christmas. Maybe Santa will get lodged in your chimney and you'll have to yank the bastard out by his ankles while reindeer peck through your roof. Maybe you'll draw the weekend shift as an elf at Sam's Club. But no matter how bad your story of holiday misery, my friend, I've got you beat. Last year, on Christmas, I broke my cock. Although, to be a bit more precise, I didn't break it by myself--my girlfriend helped.

The actual medical term is penile fracture. There's no bone in your boner, so there's really nothing to break. It's usually referred to as the eggplant deformity because, well, let's put it this way: When I was on the phone trying to describe my predicament to a nurse, I compared my cock to an eggplant, and she instantly knew what I'd done. Then she told me to get to the hospital right away.

My girlfriend Susan and I live in the Central District of Seattle in a comfortable three-bedroom house. We met at the peak of the dot-com craze, when it looked as if I'd be able to retire young on stock options. Yeah, right. That was before I had any idea what a stock market bubble was. The ensuing five years have been rough, as my paper wealth turned into actual debt, and during periods of disagreement the only thing we've had to look forward to is shagging each other's brains out.

Susan's mother was visiting us from Sacramento for the holidays, which certainly put a crimp in our humping. We'd already opened presents, and when her mother went out to see a friend, I gave Susan a lustful look she knows well. In reply I got the "Can it wait until I clean the kitchen?" look. But my look won out, and soon we were upstairs in bed.

I could make up some bullshit here, maybe rave about a position we invented that catapulted us to new erotic heights, but that's not how it happened. We were enjoying a relatively sleepy shag, missionary position, and I tried to get a little deeper inside her. We both heard it. Pop. Like the sound of a single bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap bursting. Not very loud but, given what we were doing, also not an appropriate noise. "What was that?" Susan asked. A split second after I heard it I began to feel it. "I think something's wrong," I said. "I think something is really wrong."

Gingerly I reached down and pulled out my cock. It was a lot bigger than it had ever been before. And trust me, I'm not bragging. The right side was grossly distended and purple because it was filling with blood, while the left side was trying to shrink back down. In my hand I had half a hard-on.

I'd never seen anything like it before, even during my 10 years as singer of That Petrol Emotion, a London-based rock band that toured the world, was hailed by Rolling Stone as the best new foreign group and made five critically acclaimed albums. I'd never been overly modest--hell, I used to wear spandex bicycling shorts onstage, which incited one British publication to dub me "the most shaggable man in pop."

Right now I wasn't even the most shaggable man in the Central District. Susan jumped out of bed and Googled broken penis while I said "fuck" repeatedly and slipped deeper into shock, holding the crooked stick between my legs. It looked like an erect penis but bent and bruised and pointing at the ground.

We knew we needed a hospital, but before I could get dressed I first had to let go of my fractured cock. I was afraid to do that--the ugly thing weighed a ton. Working with one hand, I pulled on my loosest boxers and a pair of oversize sweatpants. Then, fearfully, I unhanded myself and found that as long as I was careful I could walk around as if I had a load in my pants. In my neighborhood I'd fit in just fine.

The woman in charge of intake at the emergency room asked what my problem was. "Well, it's slightly embarrassing," I began. "Oh, we've seen it all," she said. Okay, then. "I think I broke my penis." Let's see them use that kind of dialogue on Grey's Anatomy.

Soon I was led to a room and told to strip, and I donned a smock. "I broke my penis!" I said to the doctor. The whole thing was starting to seem hilarious. He poked me with a toothpick to make sure I still had feeling. Ouch. I did. A female doctor walked in and let out an involuntary gasp, which did not inspire confidence. They both fetched a urologist while I lay with my eggplant penis propped up on a towel, hooked at a 15-degree angle. It was unreal, the kind of thing you might see at a seaside freak show or in a rare Victorian medical textbook.

Susan and I started giggling. "Take a picture," I said. "I do have my camera phone," she said and snapped a few photos for posterity.

The urologist's diagnosis put an end to the fun and games. He explained that three tubes run the length of the penis. When you get an erection, two tubes engorge with blood, which makes them stretch. And abnormal bending can cause them to tear. Pop.

Most often a penile fracture occurs when the woman is on top and the penis slips out during rigorous sex and slams into the perineum--you know, the little no-man's-land between the vagina and anus. A recent study on penile fractures reports more than 1,300 cases. A startling number have involved sex on office desks. A few resulted when men rolled over onto their erection while asleep. One, involving a ranch hand, mysteriously occurred in a horse corral. And in 2001 a Massachusetts man unsuccessfully sued an ex-girlfriend, alleging negligence when he suffered a penile fracture after she repositioned herself "without prior specific discussion" during sex.

In the past a penile fracture was treated like a sprained ankle, with cold compresses and splinting. But that often led to some undesirable side effects, including what doctors call penile angulation. I did not want my cock looking like a boomerang for the next 40 years.

"We're going to have to keep you overnight for a procedure," the urologist said. My heart was in my mouth, and my eyes were watering. Until this point I'd been fooling myself, figuring Susan and I would get home before her mother was even back.

The doctor explained my two options: We could do nothing and the blood might drain, given enough time. Or he could drain the blood during surgery and repair the damage. Either way, the risks included nerve damage, reduced sensation and erectile dysfunction.

I looked at Susan. Now we both were crying. "Guys who forgo the procedure have more pain and more problems later on," the urologist said. He described the operation: They'd make an incision along my circumcision scar, then slide the skin down to the base of the penis. This would allow them to drain the blood and clean up any clots.

I admit it--I'm fond of my penis. I always have been. I haven't given it a pet name or anything dumb like that, but it's one of the few things I've been able to rely on. It's a big part of me. And I was just now realizing it would never be the same.

I paused for a deep breath. "If you say this is the best thing to do, okay," I said. "When do we start?" Almost immediately they began to prep me for the first operation I'd ever had. I was extra nice to every nurse and orderly; these people were about to fillet my cock, and I wanted them to do the best possible job. A little extra karma couldn't hurt.

Six hours after I broke my cock I was in surgery. The anesthesiologist told me he was from Sydney, Australia, which reassured me. They like their cocks in Sydney, right? Okay, maybe the anesthesia was warping my mind. "You want this surgery because you want your cock back, right?" he asked. I was right! They do love their cocks in Sydney! With a flick of his thumb he started the IV drip.

The next day, when the surgeon explained that he'd found a five-millimeter rupture and stitched it up, I felt great. When the nurse tugged the catheter out of my dick, I felt great. I attribute this joy to a substantial dose of OxyContin--no wonder Rush Limbaugh loved those pills. I even high-fived Susan and the nurses and shouted jubilantly, "Yes! I still have a cock!"

Then the doctor removed the bandages and we both saw it: Franken-cock. There were 18 stitches just below the coronal ridge, and there was a little blood, too. It was kind of cool and special, actually. I felt like the kid who comes back to school in September with a cast on his arm.

My office was closed for the holidays, so during my recovery I relived my life as a rock star. I lay on the couch, watched sports or Law & Order, took prescription drugs and slept. The first day I wasn't zonked, something great happened: I got an erection. But something horrible came with it: It was excruciatingly painful. The urologist had advised me to avoid getting hard because it would put undue pressure on the repair work he'd done. But erections have a mind of their own. I tried thinking of baseball stats, dead kittens, anything to avoid ripping the stitches. In my mind I could hear it again: Pop.

Mornings were the worst. I'd sit in bed, moaning softly while my reptile brain repeatedly betrayed (concluded on page 151) Worst Break(continued from page 82) me with erection after erection. Is this how often I get hard-ons? I thought. Christ, I'm a pig. And they still curved to the right. After a week I could walk without a limp, and the pain was diminishing. But I was still panicked about sex. At my two-week checkup the urologist told me to wait four to six weeks. Which was it? Four or six? "You'll know when you're ready," he said.

Eventually erections stopped being painful and felt merely uncomfortable. After a month we decided to try a test run. Insertion would've made me scream like a Catholic schoolgirl, so I rubbed myself on Susan's buttocks. It was strange and wonderful, pleasurable but also painful. I was terrified, looking for evidence of nerve damage, when instinct suddenly took over. It wasn't long before Susan was looking for a washcloth. I wasn't 100 percent, but my cock worked.

I was concerned about the pronounced bend to the right, but the doctor said it was normal because of the scar tissue building up inside. He recommended regular exercise to stretch out the scar tissue. That's right, for the first time in my life I was under doctor's orders to jerk off. And I trained like a champ. No 14-year-old has ever played with himself as often as I did. The pain diminished, and the hook became less pronounced. The stitches began to pop out, and as the urologist had predicted, I realized I was ready.

The slight hook made it difficult to enter Susan, and it was tough not to think about what had happened last time. So we took it slowly--very slowly--which was perfect. We were like teenagers trying it for the first time. For the second time in two months I was reduced to tears by my cock.

With the progress I made, I was comfortable enough to tell the story to a few friends, always over a few pitchers of beer. Some of them have gotten dizzy or left the table, but it's a story that's hard to top. There's a little scarring, I can still feel the lump where the repair was done, and I still have what any golfer would call a mild slice. But I avoided all the worst symptoms. Erectile dysfunction will have to find another way to plague me.

I've always thought of myself as indestructible, but now, after breaking my cock, I feel mostly fortunate. I've vowed to take better care of myself, treat every day as a gift and host fund-raising events for the hospital that saved my shaft. And of course I'll continue to masturbate frequently. What's the point of having a great doctor if you don't follow his orders?

A female doctor walked in and let out an involuntary gasp. My penis was unreal, the kind of thing you might see at a seaside freak show or in a rare Victorian medical textbook.