Those infamous words "Call your doctor for an erection lasting more than 4 hours" detailed:

Q: Dr. Peters, let’s suppose I’m experiencing an erection that has lasted 3 hours and 50 minutes. How worried should I be? What’s not working the way it’s supposed to?

A: Basically, with an erection, blood enters the penis but doesn’t leave the penis. So if you have an erection that lasts too long, there’s no new oxygen going to the penis, so what can happen is that you can actually develop tissue injury because of lack of blood flow, just as you would if you cut off the flow of fresh blood to the arm or the heart.

Q: So it’s like a heart attack in your penis?

A: Yes, I guess it would be sort of like that.

Q: Why is four hours such a critical milepost?

A: Four hours is when we know tissue damage starts to occur. If it has been 12 hours, you might be looking at permanent damage.

Q: Most men look to their sexual partner for relief in this situation. Also, there’s a common home remedy that’s worked for several trillion men. Why aren’t these options for Mr. Four-Hours-and-Counting?

A: With men experiencing priapism — that’s what this condition is called — it isn’t that they can’t ejaculate, it’s just that ejaculation doesn’t relieve the erection.

Q: OK, it’s been 4 hours and change. I’ve followed your instructions and gone to the emergency room. What happens now?

A: The first thing we would do is place a needle. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: OK, so it turns out there’s a reason they don’t tell you in the TV commercials what fresh hell awaits you in the ER. And since people read this newspaper over breakfast, you’ll just have to trust me that the details are even more unpleasant than you imagined. BD)

Q: Ummm . . . what if I just decide to go home without undergoing any treatment? What’s the worst-case scenario?

A: You’ll basically have destruction of the tissue. You never have an erection again. Sometimes it could even deform the penis itself.

Q: How common is this? Does it happen to people who aren’t taking medication for erectile dysfunction?

A: You hear about this on the commercials for Viagra and Levitra, but it’s actually almost unheard of for it to occur with those pills. The other common way we treat erectile dysfunction is with injection therapy — injecting a drug like Prostaglandin or Papaverine. We actually do that a lot, and that has a much greater likelihood of creating priapism.

Some other things that can cause priapism are certain blood disorders, like sickle cell anemia or leukemia, or alcohol abuse, or trauma. And when you see people who come in with priapism who’ve been using Viagra or Cialis, almost always they have one of these underlying conditions, or they’ve been using it in combination with one of the injectable drugs.

Whatever the cause, it’s pretty rare.

You know, this would be cool if we could ad a word for each day.

ouch

XxAxX said:

what a hard word.

BlackAdder7 said:

XxAxX said:

what a hard word.

the world is a hard place to live, baby

i know. some days, i'm just glad i don't have to face the problem of priapism