Ep. 7 - Sex Sent Them to The ER

[00:12] Introduction: Sex-Related Emergencies in the ER

Dr. Bawa: Welcome to another episode of Dr. Sex Fairy. I am Dr. Kanwal Bawa and I am here, as always, to transform your life. My podcast is a lot like me. It addresses serious topics but does not take itself too seriously. You might not know this, but I am a Cleveland Clinic-trained, board-certified emergency medicine physician in addition to being Dr. Sex Fairy. I no longer work in the ER, but I will always be a product of my training and experiences.

Dr. Bawa: In fact, I saw so many sexual and sex-related emergencies that I started to wonder what was missing in our medical system and why many of these things were happening to begin with. The sexual wellness part of my rejuvenation practice, Bawa Medical, is directly related to my experiences in the ER. In fact, I'm often asked if the show Sex Sent Me to the ER is exaggerating these stories. While I am no expert on the show, I did see an episode many years ago.

Dr. Bawa: Crazy as those stories were, I have seen versions of those myself. Are all the stories true? Who knows? The premise that sex takes people to the ER is quite true. And based on my own experiences, these stories can be hard to believe even as the people themselves relate them to you. The one consistent theme through all of this was that just when I thought I'd seen it all, something would either walk in or be wheeled in through the ER ambulance bay sliding doors.

Dr. Bawa: And since I worked at the esteemed Cleveland Clinic and also flew on the trauma helicopter, you never knew what flew in either. This was before digital imaging and fancy images on computer screens. Someone showed us an X-ray of a patient's pelvis. Clearly visible was an oval foreign body. Come to find out it was a porcelain egg. I am really not sure what possesses someone to try to partially insert a slippery porcelain egg up their rectum.

Dr. Bawa: I didn't understand it then, and I certainly don't understand it now. What I understand even less, though, was the patient who inserted a light bulb up his rectum. Yes, a light bulb. I'll let you visualize that for a second.

[02:51] Why Patients Hide What Happened

Dr. Bawa: Before I go further, I would like to take a moment to talk about how difficult sex-related ER visits are for both the patients and the medical staff taking care of them. The patients are usually mortified to begin with. They don't always tell the staff what truly happened, thinking that the doctors, nurses, and other medical staff will judge them. This is unfortunate because if they would only tell us what really happened, we would be in a better position to help them.

[03:27] Sex Toys by the Numbers

Dr. Bawa: Anyway, let's talk about sex toys. The global sex toy market is expected to grow from 28.64 billion U.S. dollars to 57.2 billion U.S. dollars between 2019 and 2026 alone.

Dr. Bawa: According to America's most popular internet adult toy retailer, Adam & Eve, 50.77% of American adults admitted to owning a sex toy. That does not add up to 100%, but I'm going to let that slide for now. Forty-one percent of adults admitted to buying a sex toy at least once a year, and 12% admitted to buying them several times a year.

Dr. Bawa: When one thinks of vibrators and many similar sex toys, one does not think of them as a team sport, but clearly 37% said that they use a vibrator with their sexual partner, and 40% of men were interested in using a sexual aid with their partner. The most popular sex toy by far happens to be a vibrator. Eighty percent of adult female sex toy owners in the U.S. own a vibrator. And this right here explains much of what I have seen over the years. ERs see a lot of vibrator-related emergencies.

[04:46] Vibrator Emergencies

Dr. Bawa: You would think that I would have seen more women with vibrator-related emergencies, but that was not the case. I saw disproportionately more men come in with vibrator emergencies than women. Again, the assumption would be that these were gay men. However, many of them were straight. The ER truly sees it all.

Dr. Bawa: There was a time when I saw a patient come in with his wife with a vibrator still vibrating inside him. Apparently, his wife lost the string. Who knew that vibrators even came with a string? The things you learn every single day in the ER.

Dr. Bawa: Then there was this other gentleman who came in, again with his wife, with a vibrator that had been lost into the rectum as well. This person was so embarrassed that he took the laxative MiraLAX for two days, hoping to poop it out. Alas, that was not to be. And the vibrator traveled further up intestinally. He ended up having to go to the operating room and have his abdomen cut open in order to retrieve that vibrator. I'll bet he never used one again.

Dr. Bawa: Sometimes women lose smaller sex toys in their vaginal canal, and they have to be fished out using a speculum and forceps.

[06:13] Yoni Eggs and Retained Foreign Bodies

Dr. Bawa: Every now and then I would see someone crazy enough to follow Gwyneth Paltrow's advice and insert yoni eggs into their vagina. What is a yoni egg, you ask? I wondered that myself when I first heard about them. Yoni is a Sanskrit word that means the womb.

Dr. Bawa: There's a group of women in this country who prefer to call their vagina a yoni. People like Gwyneth Paltrow and her brand Goop have convinced them that calling it a yoni and putting jade eggs up their vaginal canal will heal them and give them better reproductive and sexual health. Not only is this untrue, in my world we call a yoni egg a retained foreign body. It is something that can cause injury, infection, and more.

Dr. Bawa: Having fished many a yoni egg out of women, I promise you that nothing good is going to come out of them except making the sellers rich. Fun fact: I am Indian and can safely tell you that Indian women call their vagina a vagina, not a yoni.

[07:27] Food, Sex, and the Banana Story

Dr. Bawa: Time to switch gears. Food and sex have always been closely related. From flavored lubricant to edible underwear to smearing and then licking delicious things off your partner, well, it's all been done since time immemorial.

Dr. Bawa: In the ER, however, food and sex are related a lot differently. I have seen people with vegetables up their rectum. It is one thing to do it and need help retrieving it. It's another thing to assume that your ER doctor is a blithering idiot and tell her that you somehow slipped on it while bringing in groceries from the car.

Dr. Bawa: Let me tell you an interesting story that happened shortly before I stopped working in the emergency department. The nurse taking care of the patient was a good friend of mine. She sat me down and told me that she needed to talk to me before I went inside the room to see the patient. When an experienced ER nurse sits you down, you'd better be ready for something crazy.

Dr. Bawa: She told me that the patient said that she lost a banana up her vagina. At this point I began to visualize this. How big was her vagina? How could she possibly lose a banana inside it? And then I wondered if she had used one of those tiny gourmet bananas and somehow lost it.

Dr. Bawa: I spoke to the patient and her story was consistent with what the nurse had just told me. When I went in to do her pelvic exam, I had a face shield and gown on. After all, you never know what is going to come flying out at you in the ER.

Dr. Bawa: Picture this. I'm sitting on a stool in my hazmat attire looking for a banana. However, I couldn't find one. I moved my speculum different ways. I asked for more light. I just couldn't see a banana.

Dr. Bawa: At this point, I looked up and said to the patient that I could not even find the peel. She looked at me with a straight face and said, "I peeled it before I put it in." She was very proud. Okay then. Clearly her vagina had processed whatever part of the banana she had put in. At this point it was gone. I guess she gave her vaginal canal a fruit facial, or what I like to call a vajacial.

Dr. Bawa: I did wonder, however, what sexual pleasure she could have gotten out of a soft, peeled banana, but then again, I have never found much logic in most of the things I have seen in the ER.

[10:29] Viagra, Cialis, and Serious Sexual Emergencies

Dr. Bawa: Funny stories aside, there can be some serious sex-related emergencies in the ER as well. I have seen several men who have had heart attacks while having sex on gas station stimulants and even many prescription medications for erectile dysfunction, for instance.

Dr. Bawa: Take Viagra and Cialis. They are commonly prescribed medications to help men get better erections. Their mechanism of action is that they dilate blood vessels and bring more blood flow into the penis artificially. What they also do is drop the blood pressure. People who are on certain blood pressure medications can collapse on these medications. This can lead to both cardiac emergencies and strokes.

Dr. Bawa: The other emergency that people often don't realize is actually an emergency until it's too late is the erection that won't go away. That four-hour rule is legit, ladies and gentlemen. Initially people think that this never-ending erection is the best thing ever. And then, several hours later, they realize that their erection isn't going away.

Dr. Bawa: They delay coming to the ER, and sometimes by the time they do come, 24 hours may have passed. Now they have irreversible damage. Now they may never have a normal erection. I have had to cut open penises and drain blood out of them in several situations to try to preserve some erectile function.

Dr. Bawa: I'll bet that most men don't realize that this is a distinct possibility when they go fill those prescriptions.

[12:09] Why Dr. Bawa Moved Into Sexual Wellness

Dr. Bawa: In fact, this is one of the main reasons why I branched into sexual wellness and intimate health. I had seen so much go wrong from these temporary fixes that I felt that I needed to do something.

Dr. Bawa: In closing, I think that today's podcast has been a great one. I told you many funny stories and a few sad ones. Every single one of them was true. Hopefully, I helped you look at sexual emergencies from a different point of view.

Dr. Bawa: After all, my Boca Raton medical practice, Bawa Medical, is the polar opposite of mainstream sexual wellness treatments. I help men treat the cause of erectile dysfunction itself and develop better function at baseline without the use of Viagra and Cialis. It is a safer way to have the sex they have always wanted without the risk of emergencies.

Dr. Bawa: What is worse than ending up with no erectile function at all trying to improve erectile function? I also help men with penile enlargement. I help them with both short-term increase in size as well as long-term non-surgical penis enlargement. This makes me rather unique, and that is why so many men travel to me from all over the world.

Dr. Bawa: And ladies, don't fret. I help women have the sex and intimate health of their dreams as well. I also take care of the LGBTQ population and their unique needs.

Dr. Bawa: There is a reason why I'm called Dr. Sex Fairy. If you would like to continue this conversation, or if you have questions about your own sexual and intimate health, email me now at askme@drsexfairy.com.

[14:01] Recorded Outro

Dr. Bawa: I hope you enjoyed the Dr. Sex Fairy Podcast today. I would love to continue this conversation with you. If you would like my top three secrets for amazing sex, send me an email at askme@drsexfairy.com and I will share them with you. Don't forget to follow this podcast and leave me a five-star review. Until next time.