The male anatomy
'He flips up the shaft and shows me the position. Really? That high? I never knew. '
I confess, I skimmed through the chapter of male anatomy in second year. So shoot me, but I figured it should be easy enough to figure out. Or so I thought.
See surgery is basically about fixing things. And knowing the anatomy is important ,so you can cut out the unwanted part and leave the good bits . If there's a lump, cut it out. If there's fluid in the brain, drain it out. If there's a plaque blocking the arteries, take a vessel from somewhere else and bypass the obstruction. So simple.
If there's retraction of the prepuce over the glans penis causing it to constrict the neck of the glans - erm wait. Whaat? How does that happen?
I confess again, I skimmed through the chapter of male anatomy. Why? It's simple, I never really got it. See the best way to learn anatomy is really by playing with the actual anatomy. You dissect the layers, play with the muscles and arteries whilst correlating what you see with the many problems that can go wrong.
My memory may be a bit hazy on this, but I'm pretty sure we never got any 'hands on' experience when it came to the male anatomy. Oh sure, we dissected the female breast, even exposing the fatty and fibrous tissue underneath, but the penis was quite a deliberate miss. Dissecting the penis of a cadaver would surely get vehement protests from my male counterparts while the more superior sex sniggers away.
It wasn't such a big loss since a third of us had the equipment and was good to go, while a good portion of those who did not possess the equipment, had other means of getting the practical knowledge.
I fall into the blessed minority and being uncommonly uninterested in the general mechanics of how things fit, I sank into a blissful ignorance.
Winters came and went. Urology (the dick doctors) clinics passed without a hitch, vasectomies seen without question and testicular examinations were avoided by giving my ED consultant a resounding 'No' for fear of further aggravating a possible torsion of the testes. I mean I could completely cut off the blood supply to the balls without knowing and that would kick me out of med school and be branded Man-hater of the year.
Unfortunately my blissful ignorance did not last long. And boy did it show along with my innocence. It all ended when I attended a paediatric surgeon's clinic one afternoon.
You think you have problems? Think again. Undescended testes is a common problem in paediatrics and parents are especially concerned when this happens to their child.
"Have you felt many testes before?" the surgeon asks me. Is he mad? Somehow the thought of going around feeling little baby boys' thingies fairly hinted of paedophilia.
So after successfully avoiding this for a long time, I had to do it. Hmm that feels weird. A bit firm and small. So that's how it feels like. Wait there's nothing on this side. Yay, an undescended testes! And so it was for the whole afternoon. Balls after balls.
The surgeon upon realising my utter lack of practical experience with the male anatomy decided to teach me more. "Ok the anatomical position of the penis is the position of the penis during sexual function." He flips up the shaft and shows me the position. Really? That high? I never knew.
The surgeon then holds the shaft, rolls back the prepuce, revealing the glans and the meatus. My eyes grew wide. Oooh the skin can be rolled back? Who knew eh? So that's how an uncircumcised penis looks like, I say to myself, quite awed at the sudden revelation that there was so much more to this simple thing.
And I confess again without shame, I am only able to write this because I have an anatomy textbook next to me.
And the fun boys have with their things was well demonstrated by the surgeon. "Now I'm going to teach you a trick," he says seriously to the fourteen year old. "I want you to watch your scrotum ok." He strokes the inner side of the boy's thigh, and the testis visibly jumps up within the scrotum. Holy crap! Awesome cremasteric reflex dude!
After almost five hours of intense kick-ass dick and ball anatomy, my surgeon says to me, "You know what, you are probably the only person in your course who now fully understands the
Right. Thanks man. I mean nothing beats a hejabi drawing the male anatomy on the blackboard whilst expounding all the bad and horrible things that can go wrong with this very precious and sensitive organ. And this is how you emasculate a man, my friends!
I can just see the caption under that Leunig cartoon, "in the mind of the female terrorist".
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Undescended testes: basically the testes is the balls (excuse my gutter language but I score 5 points for using layman's terms) and the testes at first are not in the scrotum (the sac that holds the balls). They descend downwards while the baby boy is in the womb and eventually sits in the scrotum. Sometimes this does not happen, hence the term undescended testes.
Prepuce: the skin around the front of the penis. This is the bit that gets cut off during circumcision.
3 shits:
A real "no wonder!"..
it was just 2 weeks ago when we were talking dick and ball anatomy during pbl, and the guy enthusiastically leading the discussion gave the analogy of the penis being a SHARK to help us remember its dorsal and ventral aspects. (trust the male specie to do that.)
worked in his favour--we've called him Shark since.
this is a week after we started calling another guy in the group Uterus for his interpretive dance as one. apparently it helps him remember details of the antomy better.
something about leaving a comment on firefox that screws up my posts....grrrr
what is going on...haiz....