By Will Dabbs, MD
I have a friend and patient who is a professional trapper. He kills animals like beavers and foxes and then sells the pelts. He also removes nuisance beavers as the tactical situation demands.
One such enterprise saw a couple mature beavers dam up a creek subsequently flooding a county road. He was duly engaged to rectify the problem. His weapon of choice was a massive spring-driven steel trap.
Disaster Strikes
A fully-grown Mississippi beaver can weigh upwards of 70 pounds and is immensely strong. The traps used to snuff these creatures are comparably swarthy. To cock such an imposing contrivance, you typically have to stand on the jaws before engaging the trigger. It takes a grown man’s body weight to overcome the spring pressure. Once my friend had the trap armed, he wriggled into his neoprene waders and got to work.
The plan was to take up the trap, slip into the water, and secure the thing at the base of a prominent beaver slide. As luck would have it, my buddy entered the murky water holding the trap by each side with the mouth facing toward him. This turned out to be a really bad idea.
Thusly oriented, he inadvertently encountered an underwater stob that tripped the mechanism. In an instant, the jaws leapt from his hands and closed on the front of his waders. As cruel luck might have it, the massive trap also caught the poor guy’s penis.
The neoprene mitigated the carnage perhaps somewhat, but not by much. You recall this thing is adequate to drown a thrashing 70 pound beaver. With great difficulty, my buddy pried the diabolical contraption loose from his manhood and dropped it to the bottom of the pond. The pain was such that he seemed temporarily immobilized.
In his words: “I screamed, and then I cried. And then I screamed some more, and then I cried. After a little while, I realized there wasn’t anybody close enough to hear me. If I was to survive this, I was going to have to take the initiative and sort it out myself.”
And that, my friends, is life summed up in a single sordid paragraph.
Don’t Go to the Light…
This unfortunate guy made it to the bank through sheer force of will and then methodically crawled to his pickup truck. Still dripping mud and filth, he pulled himself into the cab and carefully drove home, taking great care to avoid any unnecessary rough spots. By this point, extraneous jarrings precipitated some decidedly unpleasant sensations in his nether regions.
The brutalized man got home much earlier than was typically the case. There he found his sweet wife attending to her business. She then innocently inquired regarding the events of the day. In response, he simply stated, “I don’t want to talk about it,” before inelegantly stripping out of his grubbies and crawling into bed to die like a man.
Desperate Times Demand Desperate Measures…
The night seemed interminable. The following morning, my friend waddled into the bathroom to take stock. He later described his male member as resembling some massive purple eggplant. The pain was rumored to be beyond the capacity of the English language to adequately describe. He then wrapped himself in a towel, sought out his bride, and asked her to, “Find whatever kind of doctor it is that cuts your dick off, because I just can’t live like this.”
My buddy did indeed engage the services of a competent urologist. After a decent examination, the damage was found to be, thankfully, self-limited. Some anti-inflammatories, a little pain medication, and a bag of ice on his crotch bought him enough space to recover—no amputations required.
Time heals all wounds. Eventually, my friend returned to the scene of the accident and retrieved his sunken trap. In short order, he eradicated the offending beavers. From that point forward, he always carried his armed traps facing away from his personal hinterlands.
Ruminations
A rural medical clinic is the best place on Earth for meeting people and making friends. However, sometimes this job demands some of the most unnatural stuff. Like not laughing while listening to a friend’s fevered quest for emergency gender reassignment surgery following a horrible beaver trap mishap.
Truth among us—I was unsuccessful. I guffawed like a drunken sailor. However, this is one seriously good guy. He tolerated my mirthful reaction, smiled a bit himself, and said, “Yeah, with the benefit of a little distance, I guess it was actually pretty funny.”
