A man wound up in the emergency room after his partner accidentally bit the tip of his penis and caused it to turn black, according to a recent case study in the Visual Journal of Emergency Medicine.
According to the study, the otherwise healthy 43-year-old man showed up at the hospital five days after his partner bit his penis, saying he had a painful wound. When doctors examined his wound, they found 3 centimeters of tissue had died and, as a result, turned black.
Doctors gave the man antibiotics through an IV and decided not to perform surgery. Instead, they discharged the man and gave him more antibiotics, in the form of oral medication, for one month.
At his one-month check-up, the man had made a full recovery and only had a small penis deformity at the tip.
Genital injuries can cause lasting damage and require surgery
In other cases, genital injuries can lead to permanent damage and require surgery, according to the doctors who authored the case study.
For instance, fournier gangrene happens when a person's genitals experience trauma and the surrounding tissue becomes infected with fungus or bacteria and dies.
To it, doctors often use antibiotics, but sometimes may also be forced to remove the dead and infected skin from the genitals.
Fournier gangrene is rare, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, with an estimated 1,800 cases reported in English-language medical journals between 1950 and today.
If a person experiences genital trauma, they should see a doctor right away rather than waiting multiple days like the man and many other people do, the doctors wrote.
Other bizarre injuries from sex include pants-zipper wounds and semen allergies
This isn't the first time a person has dealt with an unexpected sex injury.
A March 2013 report in Sexual Medicine found that penile trauma due to zippers was fairly common. Researchers found that between 2002 and 2010, an estimated 17,616 people showed up in emergency rooms in the United States due to trouser zip injuries to their genitals.
"The penis was almost always the only genital organ involved," the researchers wrote.
Much more rarely, people may experience semen allergies. After a woman ingested her partner's semen, for example, she had an allergic reaction and broke out in hives.
The woman also had trouble breathing, and when doctors investigated, they discovered she had an allergy to the antibiotic penicillin. Her partner had traces of a similar antibiotic, amoxicillin, in his semen, according to BMJ Case Reports. He had been taking amoxicillin to treat an ear infection.
Allergens transferred through sex have barely been studied, and this case is one of the first that demonstrates the phenomenon.
