Personal essay: Four lacerations to penis and scrotum

‘That dog wanted me dead. Its eyes, I noticed, were brown.’

As the dog snapped its teeth to my groin, we exchanged a sort of knowing glance. Our eyes met and a horrible chill shot through me. Here I was, eyeball to eyeball with a killer, locked momentarily in a staring match with a visceral gaze of pure evil.

That dog wanted me dead. Its eyes, I noticed, were brown. I am blue-eyed. Was it envious? I have spent long hours imagining where such hatred came from. Was my bright orange sweater so offensive? Blame Jasper Conran for that. Did I walk in a threatening manner? Hard to say. As the incisors cut through blue denim it felt like I’d suffered little more than a scratch. Only when I put my hand down the front of my jeans, pulled it back out and saw red did I realise it was more serious than that.

I called the emergency services. An ambulance was first to arrive with two kind and considerate male paramedics. They inspected the damage, cleaned away some blood, called the police and swabbed my violated genitals with gauze. You can imagine the embarrassment. They asked if I wanted to wait for the police to arrive or to get straight to the hospital. Before I could answer, a police car turned the corner. 

We got off to a bad start. I told them what had happened and all they wanted to know was A) what breed of dog it was, and B) whether I wanted to prosecute the owner, who had disappeared with the killer dog into a nearby apartment block on the pretext of “putting the dog away”. One of the officers got quite aggressive on this ethically sensitive subject: “Do you want the dog destroyed?” I protested that asking me to make a life-and-death decision right now, while leaking blood onto the ambulance floor, was inappropriate. I might not have used the word “inappropriate”.

One of the lacerations was perilously close to a big vein.

At the hospital I was shown into a room where once again my genitals were studied with interest, this time by a doctor. Just as the doctor was about to stop looking and start talking about my medical predicament he was called away from the examination room to attend to an emergency, which I obviously was not. In his absence I sneaked a look at the notes he had already written: “four lacerations to penis and scrotum”. 

On his return I was told I’d had a lucky escape. One of the lacerations was perilously close to a big vein. Tetanus injection, pain medication, cleaning instructions, discharge. I phoned my wife to tell her what had happened but some kind of nervous reaction kicked in and I started laughing hysterically at the sound of myself telling this ridiculous penis story. Only when I got home and showed her my punctured testicles did she offer any real sympathy.

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