A hard day at the hospital

Every now and then when I'm watching my Buckeyes or Steelers and I'm being pelted with TV ads for Viagra or Levitra, I catch the warning at the end of those commercials. "Seek medical attention for an erection lasting more than four hours..."
Of course my initial reaction is much like most, and tends toward amusement and sarcastic remarks.
But beneath the longstanding Viagra jokes there is a real medical advance.
When I was in my medical training there was no practical medicines for erectile dysfunction, and of course it really wasn't much of a topic for discussion for that reason and of course no one wanted to admit to that kind of medical problem.
And accordingly, priapism was a medical rarity. What is priapism? Well it's an erection that wont go away. That is bad because the pooling blood can damage the vasculature and make future erections more difficult to impossible. For the urologist it's a surgical emergency. The blood must be drained, and let me tell you its not an eloquent procedure. A trocar ( thats a fancy medical word for a really sharp, pointy tube with a handle) is driven down through the head of the penis to drain the blood. I know this because I witnessed the procedure not once but twice during my urology rotation my third year of med school.
It was 1990 and I had just arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital to do my morning rounds on the urology service. I was a brand new third year medical student. I soon ran across the chief resident who appeared somewhat excited.
"I have a medical procedure for you guys that you will never see again, even if you become urologists!" he almost gloated. "Meet me down in the operating room ASAP."
The patient was a naval retiree, in his late 50 in age. He had presented to the urology clinic the previous day for treatment of his impotence (thats what we called it back then, replaced by the politically correct term ED since).
This consisted of an injection of a smooth muscle relaxer, papaverine, into the base of the penis.
It was believed that he was simply more sensitive to the drug resulting in the priapism.
The procedure made us all wince, as the blood literally nearly hit the ceiling of the operating suite. The chief resident explained that even in these patients priapism is quite rare nad no one on staff at Bethesda naval had seen a case.
Near the end of the procedure the chief resident's pager went off it was the urology front desk and the resident asked me to call since I was observing, not scrubbed into the procedure.
I spoke to the urology secretary, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
There was a second case of priapism in the clinic. Yes he did get an injection yesterday.
A call to the pharmacy lead to a review of paperwork.
An error had been made in the preparation of the injections and it contained 1000 times more drug than normal. Amazing mystery solved.
"I did THREE injections yesterday," the chief said "go to the clinic and pull the records and call the third patient and see if he is ok!"
I hauled up to the clinic to find our third victim.
I found his number and called the patient. "just a routine check sir, to see hoe yesterdays injection worked" i told him after digging his number out of the charts. I wasnt sure if I should reserve more OR time yet or not.
"Oh it worked great!" the patient said " Just one complaint, my wife didn't let me sleep all nite!"