Sex Toys and the Emergency Room
How to Keep Your Butt Out of the ER
In a world still reeling from the pandemic, many of us are more acutely aware now more than ever that hospitals can indeed fill beyond their capacity to accept new patients. We all heard about, and some of us personally experienced, the terrifying reality of the sick and injured being turned away from hospitals without treatment because there was simply no one to treat them and no bed for them to take.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted many flaws in our healthcare system. Nurses are severely underpaid and overworked. After the vaccine became widely available, we saw hospitals continue to flood beyond capacity with the unvaccinated.
Those who chose to not take the vaccine but yet, chose to go to the hospital when they fell ill, caused the healthcare system to remain over-burdened and these patients caused many other patients suffering from a plethora of common ailments (heart attacks, injuries, strokes, etc.) to not be able to receive treatment in time.
It is imperative that we seek out ways to prevent hospitals from becoming flooded to maximum capacity again. One way we can do this is to do what we can to decrease injuries that commonly lead to emergency room visits.
The incidence of sex toy related ER visits in the U.S. has doubled since 2007 (Ingraham). A lack of education about sex toys and how to safely operate them is directly responsible for these incidences.
Let’s take a look at where most people learn about sex toys and how to use them. Search for ‘sex toys’ on Google and you will immediately receive over two million results. The entire first page consists solely of stores trying to sell you all manner of toys. They’re easy to buy.
Another obvious popular method of figuring out how to use sex toys is to watch porn videos. These are not hard to come by (no pun intended). The thing about porn is that the actors tend to be professionals.
They know how to safely use the toys and pornos don’t usually include anything going wrong with them. If unsafe things are happening on screen as a result of a toy, these things tend to also be intentional and speak to various fetishes (Google ‘anal prolapse’…or don’t).
What kind of injuries are people sustaining from dildos and vibrators and the like that lead to ER visits? Ask any doctor or nurse who has worked in an ER for even just a few months and they will have several hilarious stories about patients coming in with various objects inserted up their rectums. Not just dildos, either.
If it’s oblong, it’s a candidate; zucchinis, soda bottles, unfortunate sculptures, toothbrushes, spoons, you name it. What is the common denominator here that makes these items so dangerous for the aftly inclined? They have no base.
Rule number one of safe anal dildo play is never stick anything up there that doesn’t have a base wider than the opening. This will prevent the object from ever getting stuck or “lost”. This piece of knowledge alone would prevent hundreds of people each year from becoming ER patients. Heed my words if you don’t want your x-ray to become the laughing stock of the hospital break room.
I know I’m opening a Pandora’s box here but, while we’re on the subject of avoidable sex toy injuries, let’s talk a little bit about bondage and BDSM. It stands to reason that the more toys and tools used in the bedroom, the more there is an increased risk of something going wrong with one of those items.
BDSM and kink are respectable lifestyles and activities in their own right. The problem is when a person attempts hardcore bondage with their only training for this being a couple of www.kink.com videos. Tying someone up requires preparation and experience to do safely. And, no matter what kind of rope or zip-tie you are using, one safety precaution should always be taken: have a pair of shears that you know can break through the restraint, very nearby at all times.
A restraint pinches just the right pressure point or the restrained person starts to have a medical emergency and things can go south extremely fast. That’s something Fifty Shades of Grey omitted while it was educating the masses.
Widespread and easily available information about safe practices when using various types of sex toys will decrease the number of people admitted to ERs each year for these avoidable injuries. It’s time we remove the taboo and get a mainstream, intelligent dialogue going about these topics.
Whether we’re talking about sex toy use, good nutrition, birth control, or any other aspect of human life, education is the single most powerful tool we have when it comes to reducing the number of patients entering our already over-crowded and over-burdened healthcare system.
Works Cited
Ingraham, Christopher. “Sex Toy Injuries Surged after ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Was Published.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 10 Feb. 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/sex-toy-injuries-surged-after-fifty-shades-of-grey-was-published/.
