Ring around the collar: Urban search and rescue team in Costa Mesa answers the call. They join surgical team to save a member.
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This is a once in a lifetime type call for a firefighter that I imagine most would just as soon miss. It was a two-hour job handled by the Costa Mesa Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue team.
They got the call early Tuesday morning to report to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach. There had been no earthquake. No collapse. Just a male patient whose efforts at enhancement went terribly wrong.
The job of the firefighters was to use their tools to cut around his tool and in the process not turn him into John Bobbitt. What they were cutting was a steel, ring-shaped dumbbell weight fastener. It had been on there for two or three days. Somehow he thought the fastener would make it longer.
By putting it though the hole of that device it sort of gave the man the effect he wanted, because the swelling brought it to about five times its normal size. But he apparently was dangerously close to losing the whole package when he couldn’t remove the thing.
For more on this most delicate of extrications we turn to excerpts from the article by the Daily Pilot’s Joseph Serna:
“They said his comment was, ‘This will make me the chief of my tribe,’” said Costa Mesa Battalion Chief Scott Broussard, who like others in the department, heard about the incident the next morning.
Broussard added that doctors at Hoag had told the man, who refused immediate treatment, that if he waited any longer to remove the fastener, the flesh in his penis would die.
“He was kind of a wingnut,” Broussard said.
Staff kept him in the hospital under a psychiatric hold and called the Fire Department to come remove the item because they didn’t have the tools to do it, Broussard said. Medical personnel tied down the man to a table and sedated him for the emergency, he said.
Firefighters had to don full surgery garb, including masks and scrubs.
The men constructed a watering system to keep the sparks from the sawing — which were flying half-way across the room — from injuring the patient as they cut through the inch-thick ring around his penis.
“They also slid a little piece of metal between the collar and his thing, so if it slipped past it wouldn’t hit his thing,” Broussard said.
If anything, the incident demonstrated the versatility of the city firefighters’ rescue skills, Broussard said.
“If we’re cutting people out of some kind of building, or if we’re cutting right up next to somebody’s flesh and don’t damage his flesh, then it’s a good day,” he said.
