I have always hated hospitals. Loathed them, in fact; the clinical aromas, the sterile feel, the gloomy atmosphere, the poker-faced staff. I would have given anything to be miles away from the damned place.
As of this moment, however, I had little choice in the matter. I was ensconced in one of the consulting rooms in the labyrinthine hospital complex, lying on an examination table with my genitals exposed like a horizontal flasher. The pale blue hospital gown that I wore - those hideous goddamned things that expose your ass to all and sundry - was bunched around my waist like a hula skirt.
I looked down at the semi-bald pate of the specialist bending over to examine me and I stifled a soft curse. What was his name again? Rogers. That was it. Dr. Rogers. No - Mister Rogers, I reminded myself. Specialists didn't like being referred to as Doctor.
I felt my pulse quicken. Fucking quacks; I'd had enough of them in the last six days; I'd been poked, prodded and even had a rectal thermometer up my jacksie. I was not in a good mood.
Mr. Rogers gently lowered my penis and nodded sagely at my crotch, as if my cock had just uttered some nugget of medical wisdom that only he was privy to.
"Whoever did the operation in Vietnam did excellent work," he said. "The suturing is very good indeed. Really top-class."
An irrational spasm of annoyance furrowed my brow as I realised that he was addressing his remarks to my cock, and not to my face; I suddenly knew how women felt when they complained about how some men talked to their breasts.
"I think the surgeon's name was Dr. Sew Mai Kok - something like that." I replied dryly.
He either missed or ignored the sarcasm in my voice. "Well, it really is excellent work," he assured me again, as if I should likewise be impressed. He straightened and removed his latex gloves, and grandly gestured to a vinyl chair in front of his desk in a manner that suggested he had conjured the chair into existence. I assumed that he wanted me to sit in it. I lowered myself gingerly from the examination table, rearranged the irritating hospital gown, and grumpily seated myself in the proffered chair.
Mr. Rogers was a strange looking critter; he was exceedingly tall and angular and thin as a reed, but his head was discordantly round and flat as a pie plate. Looking at his thin body and large, rotund head, I suddenly thought how apt it was that he greatly resembled the dicks that he treated. The thought made me grin waspishly, and I wondered if any of his other patients had made the same observation. He strode purposefully around to his side of the desk and sank into his leather chair like a felled giraffe. His leather chair whooshed as air rushed out of it.
He peered at me over his desk as though he was surprised to see me there. He pressed his fingertips together and rested his index fingers under his chin, as only medicos seemed to do.
"How on earth did it happen?" he asked.
I sighed and briefly closed my eyes; everyone wanted to know how it happened. It occurred to me that if it had been a two-inch cut in my arm, or my leg, or even my face, then people wouldn't really care how it happened. But get a deep two-inch slash in your dick, and suddenly every bastard wants to know the grisly details. Fucking ghouls, all of them - like people slowing down to stare greedily at a car accident, wanting to absorb every morbid detail.
I raised my eyelids and slowly focused on Mr. Roger's round face hovering over his desk like a moon looming over the horizon. Maybe he wanted to chronicle this one and submit it to The Lancet, I thought rancorously.
I decided to give him the long version. I gritted my teeth and began: "Just over five months ago I was contracted to work as the chief supervisor on a construction job in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, building a new multi-storey shopping center. It was a six-month contract, working six days a week. I didn't really want the job, since it would mean I'd be away from my wife and home for half a year - but the money they offered was too good to refuse. There's a boom in building there right now, and they're offering top dollar for guys with my experience in the industry.
"Anyway - last Friday four of the company big shots fronted up, wanting to check out progress on the job. There wasn't anything new for them to see, but what the hell - they paid my salary, so I started showing them around. We went up to the first floor. You have to understand that since it was a commercial building and not a residential one, the first floor was a lot higher than normal - maybe twenty-five feet off the ground.
"There was a section up there that was still accessible only by scaffold, and we started to cross it. Whether the scaffold rigging was faulty, or the bolts snapped, or whether the weight of five men was too much for one weak section to bear, I don't know. But as we crossed it, something broke - the scaffold gave way at one end, right under our feet.
"It all happened so fast - one minute I was just walking, and the next minute I was falling. My first reaction was to grab one of the steel uprights, the round supports that held the scaffolding up - but I could only get my right hand around the tubing, since I was holding a clipboard in my other hand and I didn't think to drop it in time. Grabbing hold of the support with my right hand swung my body outwards slightly, but with the downward momentum that I already had I couldn't slow myself up with one hand - not around the smooth steel. All it did was slow my fall a little, but I still slid down the pole - fast.
"It just so happened that there was a sign bolted to the scaffold bracing under me, and it overlapped the support that I was sliding down by a few inches. The sign was made from cheap tin sheeting, and as you can obviously guess, the corner of the tin hadn't been rounded off, and it was extremely thin and sharp. Under normal circumstances, this didn't matter; the sign was eight feet above the ground, and nobody was going to hit their head on it that high up - even if they were wearing a safety helmet. What they didn't think of was someone coming down the pole, like I was doing.
"My crotch collided with the sharp edge of the overhanging tin. All I felt at the time was a painful sting and then a jolt that basically halted my descent and pushed me backwards, and I lost my grip on the support. I fell the last six or seven feet or so to the ground and landed on my back, knocking the wind out of me. I looked up the see two of the company guys hanging from the edge of the scaffold, yelling and scrambling to get back up. The other two guys had fallen like I had, and they had landed beside me and one of them - the one who ended up with a broken pelvis - was screaming. I raised my head to look at him - and that's when I saw the blood on my thigh. My blood."
I paused my account, remembering the hot burning that had started then. I had reached down to my crotch and felt the ripped material of my trousers, and when I looked at my fingers they were slick with blood. Then the pain suddenly tore through me, and I realised that I was screaming too.
The next two hours or so was now a blur of agony and shock and dread. Luckily the hospital was close by, and I remembered how the ambulance siren had wailed. I was eventually sent to the operating theatre for immediate surgery.
After I awoke from the anaesthetic, the bespectacled surgeon had appeared at my bedside. In reasonable English he'd explained what had happened; as I slid down the steel pole, the sharp corner of the tin sign had effortlessly slashed through my trousers and underwear. It had grazed my scrotum, luckily pushing it backwards out of the way. My luck, however, was short-lived, and the sharp metal corner then pierced the underside of my penis, near the root and slightly to one side, half-slicing and half-ripping nearly three-quarters of the way through as I continued sliding down the steel support. The jolt that curtailed my rapid descent and threw me backwards was my steel belt buckle catching the upper edge of the tin sign. The surgeon said that I was fortunate - if I hadn't been wearing the belt, then not only would my fall have been heavier, but the sharp metal might have continued upward, cleaving my glans in two, and carrying on to tear me open from crotch to throat. What a happy thought. Just marvellous.
A total of eighteen stitches had closed the two-inch slice in my cock, as well as some internal stitching. Painkillers took the edge off the agony.
I had spent the next three days in hospital for observation. A sombre delegation of company officials duly paid me a visit, informing me that a flight back to Australia had been arranged at my convenience. As far as I was concerned, it was convenient for me to leave immediately, and I told them to arrange a flight ASAP. I wanted to go home. I gingerly boarded a flight from Tan Son Nhut airport the next day, my crotch swathed in bandaging under my loose trousers. My frantic wife Angela had met me at Tullamarine airport in Melbourne.
Mr. Rogers shook his head and tutted. "Very nasty," he intoned tonelessly. "I assume that you will seek legal recourse for this injury?"
"Yes indeed," I replied. I had made a preliminary phone call to a law firm yesterday, and they were already rubbing their greedy little hands together in anticipation of the settlement they could demand if I wasn't satisfied with the offer of compensation that the company was sure to offer me.