When, at long last, the image of a man stretching his anus impossibly wide for the entire Internet ceases to shock or even surprise, where can we turn? What else could so universally revolt us and and strain credulity as the infamous Goatse once did? Well, allow me to introduce the guy who got a fork stuck up his penis.
Where an ordinary photograph would certainly and vividly communicate the grotesquerie of this medical emergency, the X-ray version, courtesy of the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports, is almost too much for anyone with nerve endings to bear. In it, we see that a 4-inch fork that has been inserted into a urethra—handle first, thank god—where it then predictably got stuck.
We also see much more than that (NSFW! NSFL!): the actual fork, the actual penis, the doctor’s gloves, the prongs that remove the foreign object. Here’s all we can show you:
The patient was a 70-year-old Australian pensioner, obviously still keeping active; he had been using the fork to achieve “sexual gratification.” The doctors who performed the operation to remove the object had a sense of humor equal to their work: It is “apparent that the human mind is uninhibited let alone creative,” they wrote in their report on the unusual incident, “An Unusual Urethral Foreign Body,” published because of “the great management challenge faced by the oddity and infrequency with which a fork is encountered in the penile urethra.”
The steel cutlery item was successfully removed from its bloody burrow, though the damage to the man’s reputation is almost surely permanent—which explains why most victims of such injuries try to fix the problem themselves, in private, and make it worse in the process.
“Autoerotic stimulation with the aid of self-inserted urethral foreign bodies has been existent since time immemorial,” the doctors dryly noted, “and have presented an unusual but known presentation to urologists.”
An admirably scientific reaction to something that is sure to make the other 99.9999% percent of the planet recoil in horror, grab their genitals protectively, and maybe hug a loved one. I know, for my own part, that I’m to be haunted evermore by the rattle of a kitchen silverware drawer. Let’s just use our hands at dinner, please?