Have you ever put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear?
Yes. I used to do that thing with cotton buds until the end of one came off, like they always warn you, and I was so embarrassed that I tried to get it out myself with various rusty old tools I had from my dissecting kit when I was a medical student (these are the tools that had previously been used to dissect dead flesh, but I did give them a wash.) When that didn’t work, I tried to flush it out with a high pressure shower head. I couldn’t tell whether that had worked so I rather reluctantly asked my wife, Dr Rose, to check if she could see anything abnormal in my ear. ‘Why?’ ‘No particular reason.’
She spotted a white bit, wasn’t sure what it was, couldn’t shift it and – as we were about to go on holiday – insisted I had someone look at it. I wasn’t sure I could face the accident and emergency department, joining the queue of other children with beads in their ears/nostrils/windpipe. So I emailed a friendly ENT consultant who agreed to see me without having to parade my stupidity in front of assorted receptionists, nurses and junior doctors (who I’d probably taught at some stage).
‘There’s no cotton bud in your ear’
‘So what’s the white thing my wife can see?’
‘An exostosis.’
‘Will I find it on Wikipedia?’
‘It’s a bit of bone that often grows in the ears of surfers and swimmers to protect the drum from the rush of cold water.’
‘Do I need it removed?’
‘Can you hear alright?’
‘Yes.’
‘No then. Just don’t put anything else in your ear.’
‘Are you sure it’s not a pebble?’
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
Back in 1987, I was a medical student, on an elective in India with my friend Sube (who’s now a Professor of Psychiatry). This was a period of study meant to give us experience of how the health service worked abroad. Most students took it terribly seriously, some even picking up scalpels and whipping out appendices in remote huts in faraway countries with no lawyers. Sube and I weren’t interested in such heroics. We just wanted to slob out on the beach before our final exams and the drudgery of house-jobs.
We did visit one hospital, in Calcutta, and were amazed at the diagnostic ability of a doctor who had no access to machines to do the thinking for you. He just sat and listened. When he fell through the rotting floor of the hospital, we decided we’d seen enough listening and travelled across to Delhi, through Rajasthan, down to Mumbai and on to Goa.
I’d like to tell you about the lavish temples, colourful festivals and the potent architectural relics of Old Goa, but we didn’t move much from the sea. When we arrived, we rented a hut on the nearest beach. It had a top of the range ‘pig system toilet’. You shat through a hole in the floor and the pigs ate it. Alas, we didn’t spot this revelatory method of sanitation until our third night of spaghetti carbonara (and surprisingly tasty it was too).
For sterilisation, we discovered feni, a potent spirit allegedly distilled from cashew fruit but with bits floating in it. Too much could turn you blind – the high ethanol content takes out the optic nerve – and alarms bells should have rung when the feni man appeared with a very low budget guide dog (more of a pig, to be fair).
We were sitting on the beach in a post-feni blur, when a boy approached us and asked if we’d like to have our ears checked for the stones which get stuck after swimming. Sube sensibly declined and carried on reading his Freud. But I didn’t like the idea of swimmers’ stones in my ear, so I let him look. He discovered four in each ear, calling on Sube to witness them. He then quoted me a lump sum, roughly equivalent to all my remaining rupees, fished the stones out with a pair of long-toothed tweezers and left a lot richer.
For a few days I was convinced my hearing was better, so I shared my story with the blind feni-man, who I thought could do with some tips on preserving his hearing.
‘Doh! He put the stones in there to take them out again, you gullible ginger tit.’
‘How did you know I was ginger?’
I learnt a lot from this. Doctors are human and we don’t always follow our own advice, especially under the hot sun in a strange country after a couple of fenis. But there’s no excuse for experimenting with cotton buds in the privacy of your own bathroom. You only push the wax in further, when it backs up against the exostosis and you can’t hear a bloody thing. No more neighbour’s car alarm, no more children fighting, no more being asked to put the rubbish out. Bliss, in fact.
What’s the biggest wobbly a patient’s thrown in front of you?
When I worked in casualty, a boy came in who’d spent ages collecting small objects for his school ‘how many things can you fit in a matchbox?’ competition. He’d been brilliantly inventive (a milk tooth, a staple, a bogey, a pubic hair, a woodlouse, a cat biscuit, a drawing pin, something that might be a chocolate raisin but we’re not sure, the tail of a rodent that the cat had left by the back door etc etc). On the day of judging, he left his prize collection by the front door so he wouldn’t forget it. His toddler brother spied it, opened the box and wolfed the lot, pretty much down in one.
Cue three hysterical people in reception. Toddler didn’t like the after taste and Mum thought he was going to die. But his brother was so upset, he could have been auditioning for Golem. ’Make him sick! Make him sick! Give me my precious things.’ Triage that. We observed the toddler for a while and he was fine. The human digestive system has an amazing capacity to absorb punishment. But the brother was scarred for life.
Have you ever tried anything illicit?
I had a fairly routine, curious youth until I discovered that whatever gets you through the night stops you functioning during the day. And you don’t need any form of stimulant to wonder at an orchid that mimics the sexual parts of a bee. There’s so much joy and fascination out there in the everyday that it doesn’t need expanding or mellowing. And it’s quite possible to dance without ten bottles of Sol and some horse anaesthetic.
Have you ever tested legal drugs?
Yes, as a medical student I did quite a few ‘first in human’ trials, not out of altruism but because I needed the money. The Guy’s hospital unit took pretty much anyone who wasn’t diseased, pregnant or a Guy’s student (very embarrassing to kill one of your own), and whose liver didn’t extend much further than the navel. Some trials were residential, some had me cycling from Lambeth to London Bridge with a twenty-four-hour urine collection balanced on the handlebars (far riskier than any of the drugs I took).
Lots of students refused to do trials in a ‘you must be stupid, you don’t know what you’re taking’ sort of way. Others only went for trials of new batches of established drugs, but I was game for anything. I can’t remember the name of a single drug I tested, but at £500 for a lost weekend it kept the bank manager happy. The only drawback was that the multiple needle holes marked you out like any other user.
If you were lucky, you got a placebo. Only once did anything really bad happen. A bloke in front of me in the queue had an anaphylactic reaction. Presumably that wasn’t placebo. We all just stood there as he was resuscitated, trying to remember the correct dose of adrenaline and mulling over how much we really needed the £500. None of us walked out.
The staff were relatively easy to humour, although they did all have beards and kept us under lock and key. One made the mistake of letting a student out to bulk buy MacDonalds, or at least the bits of MacDonalds that don’t affect your liver enzymes. He left the door ajar to allow several conscripts to sneak out to the pub over the road. They were guilty of scientific fraud, but seventy-two hours is an awfully long time to make a medical student go without beer. Sadly, the unit’s director spotted the bum pressed up against the pub window and docked it £200, which was a lot of money in those days but nothing compared to the drug company who finds its new wonder drug does unexpectedly horrible things to the liver.
Generally, people do well in drug trials, especially further do
wn the line when they’ve figured out how safe it is and how much to give. And in the NHS, it may be the only way to get an expensive new drug. Even if you get a placebo or the standard treatment, you get far more attention than normal because people are desperate for you to do well. Tea, coffee, nurses that smile, foot massages. Stapled to my donor card, I’ve put a PS. ‘In the event of me being unconscious, please enter me in a drug trial. If that fails, let me die quickly and take anything you need.’
Have you ever had a TUBE?
Totally Unnecessary Breast Examinations are rare in men but I’ve had one, while walking from New Street Station in Birmingham to the British Renal Society conference at the ICC on Broad Street. I was pulling a wheely-bag at the time, and off guard, when a bloke just walked up and grabbed my moobs. It wasn’t painful but it threw me a bit, like a good heckle. Last time I was at the ICC, a bloke ran very fast across the atrium towards me and said: ‘I know you. You’re Lenny Henry.’ He then kissed me and ran off. There’s something about Birmingham. More parks than Paris, more canals than Venice and very friendly perverts.
Have you ever been whipped?
Yes. It wasn’t, alas, a private exchange of power for pleasure amongst two consenting adults but a very public and painful flogging at the end of my stag party. I’d gained the prior consent of my best man that no ‘o-grams’ of any sort would be deployed, but another friend made a spur of the moment judgement on a card in a phone kiosk and, an hour later, in strode a terse woman in a black PVC bodysuit, six-inch spiked heeled leather boots and a cat o’ nine tails. She was at the end of a bad evening and took her venom out on my rump. Although I’d had the equivalent of a general anaesthetic’s worth of lager, the pain was extraordinary. My yelps were apparently much funnier than any joke I’ve ever told. And the lash marks were still with me on the wedding night. Lights off and under the duvet, quick. ‘Why are you sleeping with your boxer shorts on?’ ‘Am I?’
For some reason, being degraded in a French restaurant by a stranger on your stag night is a cultural norm, whereas doing it for fun with your soulmate in the privacy of your home dungeon is considered taboo. But maybe that’s what makes it exciting. Transgressing the borders of the forbidden, and all that. My local subdom club, the Stowey Bottom Users Group, suggests a couple of books on the subject if you fancy giving it a go. The Loving Dominant by John and Libby Warren (written in an amusing style for dominants and submissives, and with a handy chapter on first aid), and Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns by Philip Miller and Molly Devon (featuring knots, rope harnesses, making your own equipment, correct flogging methods and a thorough anatomy lesson with target areas and places to avoid clearly marked). And remember you are allowed to laugh uncontrollably, an entirely natural reaction to being shackled to the mattress handles with the Maypole ribbons. Trust me.
Have you ever had a dose?
Yes. Gonorrhoea, just the once, nearly thirty years ago. But I still remember the pus; rivers of the stuff, right through my boxer shorts and into my theatre greens. In my defence, people of my age (forty-seven) often kicked off their sexual careers before HIV arrived, and we weren’t as careful as we should have been. Plus the fact that when you’ve got ginger hair, freckles and glasses, you’re so amazed that someone will have sex with you, precautions go out of the window (or at least remain in the back pocket of the jeans on the other side of the room).
The consultant at Westminster hospital didn’t have to put anything down my penis because it was dripping out. He got so excited, he invited me backstage to peer down the microscope: ‘Look at that! Gram negative intracellular diplococci. Aren’t they beautiful?’ Not as beautiful as a condom, matey. To cheer me up, he told me about all the film stars, MPs, judges and clergy he’d treated in the clinic.
We’re all susceptible to pleasure. I once chaired a conference of sexual health consultants and asked them to put their hand up (in the air) if they’d knowingly had at least one sexually transmitted infection. Six did. Then I asked the same question via the confidential conference keypad. 106 had; well over half the room. It’s one of the few specialties where the doctors treating you know what they’re talking about.
What would you like to be if you weren’t a doctor?
An Honorary Lecturer in Applied Pleasure in the Department of Modified Hedonism at Mendip University, Stowey Bottom.
Do you still have your penis enlarger?
Yes. I grow cacti in it.
Do patients take you seriously?
Occasionally. And I can be terribly serious when I have to be.
Have you ever been anyone’s wonder pony?
Not yet. But I live in hope.
What are your favourite Sex Scrabble words?
The beauty of Sex Scrabble is that it’s part game, part foreplay, part therapy, and allows you to get issues and desires out there that you’re too shy to drop into general chat. Slang aside, the sex literature is littered with ridiculously long and convoluted words of more than seven letters. For challenges, I recommend The Complete Dictionary of Sexology (New Expanded Edition). It’s quite hard to get hold of, so here are a few of my favourites:
acrai – Arabic term for a woman who really enjoys her sex.
amourette – a short-term affair in French, and an extension of amour.
ampulla – the opening of a tube, e.g. fallopian.
analist – a person whose erotic fantasies are focused on the anus. Easily confused with analyst. From spreadsheets to spreadcheeks.
balanic – pertaining to the glans of the penis or clitoris.
blissom – a blissful state of sexual heat.
bowser – a merkin.
carezza (or karezza) – Tantric intercourse in which erection and insertion are prolonged by minimal thrusting and without ejaculation. Note: don’t rely on this for contraception.
copulin – a vaginal pheromone first isolated from a rhesus monkey that encourages the male to copulate.
dasypygal – having hairy buttocks (and worth stealing 2 extra letters for).
eonism – transvestism.
frenum – very sensitive part of the penis just below the glans on the underside. Some people pierce it for pleasure.
guiche – a metal ring inserted in the perineum, twixt genitals and anus, and pulled on lightly for pleasure. Not to be confused with quiche.
herm – a stone sculpture popular in ancient Greece with the head of Hermes and a large phallus at the base. More a symbol of male power than a celebration of sex.
kimilue – a triad of extreme apathy, loss of interest in life and vivid sexual dreams found among the Diegueno Indians of lower California and most teenage boys.
koro – a morbid fear of shrinking genitals brought on by masturbatory guilt or promiscuity. In some Eastern cultures, a wise Aunt is wheeled out to prevent reabsorption.
mahu – the sole transvestite in Polynesian villages who allows otherwise heterosexual men a casual outlet.
nonage – someone below the legal age for whatever you happen to be discussing.
olisbis – a leather phallus used in lesbian sex.
onanism – masturbation or withdrawal before climax, named after the biblical character Onan who was punished for spilling his seed on the ground.
orchis – Greek for testicle, based on the observation that the root of an orchid looks like a scrotum. Now why would God do that?
passion – an extreme, compelling emotion, drive or excitement. Vital for life but it needn’t have anything to do with sex.
philia – non sexual love shared by friends.
spac – small penis anxiety complex. Vanishingly rare.
ALSO BY DR PHIL
Dr Phil Hammond’s Rude Health Show Live (DVD)
Medicine Balls – a self help medical comedy with poems
Phil Hammond’s Confessions of a Doctor Live (DVD)
Trust Me, I’m (Still) a Doctor – shocking secrets of an NHS
whistleblower
FURTHER BROWSING
; www.embarrassingproblems.com
www.idler.co.uk
www.drphilhammond.com
To everyone
who put a hand up
* * *
‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes but in having new eyes.’
Marcel Proust (author)
* * *
‘Life. Be in it.’
Brian Dixon (Australian Rules footballer)
* * *
‘First do no harm.
Next give some pleasure.’
Dr Phil (modified hedonist)
* * *
Also by Dr Phil
Medicine Balls
a comic prescription to save the NHS
Trust Me, I’m (Still) a Doctor
a Private Eye whistleblower’s diary
Dr Phil Hammond’s Rude Health Show (DVD)
a delightfully vulgar live show with a message
Dr Phil Hammond’s Confessions of a Doctor (DVD)
Sex, Sleep or Scrabble Page 22