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My little sister is an E.R. nurse, and she sent me this item (typed
in by me verbatim).  The glossarial terms in [brackets] suggested by her.

			--- start ---

From the "Unusual Case" column of _Aspects of Human Sexuality_,
July 1991, by William A Morton, Jr, MD.  Reprinted without permission.

"Scrotum Self-Repair"

One morning I was called to the emergency room by the head ER
nurse.  She directed me to a patient who had refused to describe
his problem other than to say that he "needed a doctor who took
care of men's problems."  The patient, about 40, was pale,
febrile [feverish], and obviously uncomfortable, and had little
to say as he gingerly opened his trousers to expose a bit of
angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.

After I asked the nurse to leave us, the patient permitted me to
remove his trousers, shorts, and two or three yards of foul-
smelling stained gauze wrapped about his scrotum, which was
swollen to twice the size of a grapefruit and extremely tender.
A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and blood, extended down
the left scrotum.

Amid the matted hair, edematous [swollen] skin, and various
exudates, I saw some half-buried dark linear objects and asked
the patient what they were.  Several days earlier, he replied, he
had injured himself in the machine shop where he worked, and had
closed the laceration himself with a heavy-duty stapling gun.
The dark objects were one-inch staples of the type used in
putting up wallboard.

We X-rayed the patient's scrotum to locate the staples; admitted
him to the hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, broad-
spectrum antibacterial therapy, and hexachlorophene sitz baths
prior to surgery the next morning.  The procedure consisted of
exploration and debridement [removal of dead skin] of the left
side of the scrotal pouch.  Eight rusty staples were retrieved,
and the skin edges were trimmed and freshened.  The left testis
had been avulsed [ripped or torn out] and was missing.  The stump
of the spermatic cord was recovered at the inguinal canal,
debrided, and the vessels ligated [tied off] properly, though not
much of a hematoma [pocket of blood] was present.  Through-and-
through Penrose drains [?] were sutured loosely in site, and the
skin was loosely closed.

Convalescence was uneventful, and before his release from the
hospital less than a week later, the patient confided the rest of
his story to me.  An unmarried loner, he usually didn't leave the
machine shop at lunchtime with his co-workers.  Finding himself
alone, he had begun the regular practice of masturbating by
holding his penis against the canvas drive-belt of a large
floor-based piece of running machinery.  One day, as he
approached orgasm, he lost his concentration and leaned too close
to the belt.  When his scrotum suddenly became caught between the
pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into the air and
landed a few feet away.  Unaware that he had lost his left
testis, and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the
wound closed and resumed work.

I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification.

			--- end ---

My sister had two thoughts:

	1) is this covered by Workmans' Comp?

	2) in a machine shop somewhere, somebody is asking "Hey Joe,
	   what's the dog playing with over there?"

Gee, talk about blowing your wad...

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