A 37-year-old man was rushed to a hospital in Surabaya, Indonesia, and told doctors he was suffering from severe abdominal pain. They were shocked when the patient revealed that he had inserted a 2-meter-long nylon thread into his penis during masturbation and couldn’t remove it.
The patient, whose identifying details weren’t released, also complained of difficulty urinating and blood in the urine. According to doctors, it took him a while to confess that he had inserted the thread into his urethra when his penis was erect.
In detailing the incident in Radiology Case Reports, the doctors who treated him noted that cases of insertion of objects into the urinary tract are "relatively rare," but have been on the rise in recent decades.
The report states that people usually inject objects like bobby pins, straws, matches and pencils into their urethra for sexual pleasure, or due to psychological problems or after drug use. Those who do this for sexual pleasure often delay seeking medical help and don’t provide information.
Alternatively, they give inaccurate information due to embarrassment which increases the risk of complications such as urinary tract infections, bladder stones and blood poisoning.
Doctors explained that inserting objects into the urethra can damage sensitive tissue in the area that releases urine and semen. It can also lead to bladder control loss, infection of the penis and urethra and may even require surgery or implants to restore the sensitive tissue.
The patient, a virgin, told doctors it was the first time he had put anything in his urethra, even though he was masturbating and watching porn every day. Doctors performed a bladder flush, a procedure in which sterile fluid is inserted through a catheter into the bladder to remove blockages in the hope that it will remove the thread, but the procedure didn’t work.
They then performed a cystoscopy with a camera inserted into the bladder through a tube so doctors could see what was going on inside. The doctors noticed a "black bundle of nylon thread" and finally managed to remove it by inserting a particularly thin and long pair of tweezers.
According to local media reports, the patient, who remained under observation at the hospital for two days before returning to his mother’s house, completely recovered. A psychiatrist, to whom the doctors referred him, determined that he was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and paraphilia - a sexual stimulus or action that deviates from normal sexuality and creates an urge which is only relieved via sexual stimulation or orgasm.