I have a question that only you might be able to answer. My brother claims to be well endowed enough that a former “girlfriend” says he bruised one of her ovaries. Now, nothing is totally impossible, but how likely is it that this could happen with normal human beings? Are there ANY cases of it on record? What are the most common injuries from rough sex, anyway?
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Not to suggest your brother was jerking you around, Dwayne, but we need to consider the physical realities. Do you have any idea where the ovaries are? Allow me to give you a little tour. Entering the female reproductive system by means of the vagina, we travel four to five inches until we reach the cervix, the muscled entrance to the uterus. The cervix normally is tightly closed, although it can dilate, not without difficulty, to allow passage of babies, IUDs (inserted through a straw), etc. Arriving in the uterus, a fist-sized organ located an inch or two below the waistline, we then make a sharp right or left turn to reach the fallopian tubes. The tubes are three to four inches long with an inner diameter the size of a human hair. They connect the uterus to a point near the ovaries, curving around a good deal in the process. In other words, to bruise an ovary directly, your brother would need a member like one of those scary prehensile tentacles in Men in Black II. If he’s got one, all I know is, he’s never getting in the backseat of a Chevy with me.
Painful as dyspareunia can be, worse things can happen. We learn this from a recent article entitled “Urological Complications of Coitus” (BJU International, February 2002), by a urological surgeon in Nigeria with the unfortunate name of Dr. Eke. Eke assembled reports on an astonishing 1,454 cases, 790 in men and 664 in women. By far the most common injury in men was penile fracture, which this column has dealt with in the past and which I continue to think is the stupidest injury known to medicine. Injuries in women were more diverse, including lacerations in the vagina and perineum (the area between the vulva and the anus), infections, and so on. Among the factors leading to injury, Eke observed, were forceful coitus, congenital vaginal anomalies, and–here’s where it gets interesting– “penovaginal disproportion.”
