The Silkworm's Scarf

I've been struggling to decide whether or not I should do a post about my two weeks spent in urology, getting to know the foreskin. I wasn't sure if it would be... tasteful. I didn't know whether or not my parents and family (who read my blog) would approve. I didn't know whether or not my reading public - whom I barely know! because they never leave me comments! hint hint! - would approve. Yes, readers, Karen Little, who once wrote an entire post about the bad things that can happen to your anus without a care in the world, was worried about whether or not people would be offended if she wrote about the little piece of extra skin at the end of a man's penis. What a ninny! And then I came across this post, over at All Scrubbed Up. And it was like a big sign saying Karen, you shall write about the foreskin. And so I shall.

I'll be honest, the concept of the foreskin has always been a little bit difficult for me to grasp. For a long time, I was under the impression that the part I now know is called the glans was the foreskin. This was thanks to Bryce Courtenay, whose protagonist PK (from The Power of One) was circumcised, and was mocked by the boere-seuntjies at school for his hatless snake. I read The Power of One when I was eleven, and in my eleven-year-old mind, the only part of a penis that vaguely resembled a hat was the glans. (I know you're all thinking about this hard now, and I'm right, aren't I? The glans does look a bit like one of those army helmets!) Second year anatomy didn't help to enlighten me much at all - poor Petrus's penis had been pickling for two years by the time we got to it. What we saw was little more than a super-dry piece of biltong, and there was absolutely no way that the mechanism or structure of a foreskin could be demonstrated on the cadaver. Furthermore, our rather inexpert manner with the dissecting scalpels rendered what was left of the anatomy abnormal, and I was thus once again left floundering in the field of the foreskin.

To be honest, it wasn't until last week, when I performed a circumcision myself (relax - I was 'assisted' by a proper urologist who kindly cautered a little row of spots along the patient's corona, so that in order to make my incision all I had to do was play join-the-dots) that I finally fully and truly understood what a foreskin is. It's not a thing by itself. It's part of a greater thing - the skin over the penis. It's the little extra bit at the end, the bit the flaccid penis is too small to fill. A circumcised penis is not a hatless sake, Mr Courtenay, but rather a scarfless silkworm.

The big question surrounding the foreskin is whether or not to chop. I differ from SA Doc here, and tend towards being anti-chop, unless you have a good religious reason, or a food medical indication (like a pathological phimosis, or genital warts*) for the chop. It's an emotional issue in many parts of the world, I know. Here, it's bordering on a human rights issue, as more and more young men are killed or horribly maimed each year in traditional circumcisions, where their foreskins are hacked off by some blunt and contaminated object and then left to heal by themselves. I'll concede that most bloggers and blog-readers aren't going to submit themselves to that kind of mutilation, but even the small procedure that is a circumcision, when carried out in the best medical hands carries risks, and ones that I don't believe are worth taking unnecessarily.

Urology was a fun rotation. The doctors were relaxed and friendly, the calls quiet, and the subject matter reasonably simple. Let's just hope I enjoy the exam as much.

*On the subject of genital warts, or condylomata acuminata - what a fantastic party trick! Granted, it's one you'd much rather see on someone else than on yourself, but it really is quite entertaining. Now you're grasping what, to all intents and purposes, looks like a perfectly normal, uncircumcised penis. Then you give one little slip of the hand, and - voila! Is it a bunch of miniature grapes? A new and exciting fungus to put on your pizza? A collection of small sea anenomes? No! It's a bunch of genital warts! Marvellous!