area, a Klaxon of pain would sound
across my central nervous system.
I wrote to Dr. Funnyman, who replied
that, given my initial soreness, he was
not surprised that it was taking me lon-
ger to heal than expected. “For slow
learners like yourself, this could take six
weeks,” he wrote. I assumed he meant
“slow healers” instead of “slow learners,”
but I came away with the feeling that
the fault was somehow in my body and
its inability to “learn” how to respond
to a minor genital bonfire. In a later
e-mail, the doctor surmised that “there’s
something about your skin chemistry
that’s just different from the average
bear.” I took umbrage until my wife ex-
plained Yogi Bear to me. Perhaps the
doctor was right. Something within me
was wrong. I was not a very average or
fast-learning bear.
My condition began to take over
my daily life, like a game of Twister
but with each wrong move resulting in
a jolt of groin pain. To get out of my
car without the affected organ scrap-
ing unduly against my underwear, I
began to propel myself from the seat
in one quick motion, until one day I
hit my head hard on the doorframe,
and spent weeks nursing a headache.
Eventually, I quit driving. Lifting gro-
cery bags became impossible. Sitting
on a hard chair excruciating. Drying
my groin with a towel unbearable.
Wearing jeans unbelievable (only sweat-
pants would do). Playing hide-and-
seek with my son out of the question.
Even sleeping required a fort of pil-
lows placed in strategic locations to
keep my penis airborne through the
night. I had been advised to use numb-
ing lidocaine jelly, and to wear sooth-
ing Xeroform gauze held in place by
an improvised bandage. My wife, upon
seeing the shaft of my organ covered
in bandage and gauze, sadly compared
it to the Elizabethan collar worn by
dogs (not that I was in danger of lick-
ing myself ). Erections became danger-
ous, and at night I turned away from
my wife so that I would not smell the
deliciousness of her hair. I began to
wonder: Was this the rest of my life?I
decided to expand my medical hori-
zons. My primary doctor recom-
mended a specialist in “minor outpa-
tient urological procedures” whom I
will call Dr. Neuroma. I visited thedoctor’s aerie in the medicinal slab of
the Weill Cornell tower on York Av-
enue. The doctor, younger than Fun-
nyman but not as funny, could not give
a full examination, because touching
either of the termini of the former skin
bridge produced intolerable pain. He
ventured an opinion. In all likelihood,
I was suffering from a penile neuroma.
Some readers may be familiar with
Morton’s neuroma, a highly painful
malady that often manifests itself be-
tween the toes and may make walking
difficult. This was that but in the penis.
“A tiny nerve gets swollen,” the doc-
tor said. “A nerve was snapped or cut
during the surgery, and the proximal
end is angry or inflamed or trying to
reach for the other end, but there’s no
other end to receive it and that may
be felt as pain.” In this interpretation,
my nerves were a bunch of ragtag troops
stranded on a remote island who had
not been informed by general staff that
the war was over.
The doctor left for what felt like
twenty minutes to answer a pressing
text message. When he returned, he
said that my problem was a rare out-
come, “one chance in a hundred, bad
luck for you and bad luck for the doc-
tor.” He also told me that he expected
I would get about “eighty per cent
better” and would learn to live with
the rest of the pain. In the meantime,
I should “keep it moist and lubricated
down there,” and take gabapentin, a
drug that was primarily used as an
anti-seizure medication but that could
also reduce nerve pain. I walked out
of the hospital building into a surpris-
ingly hot October day with the softly
spoken but uncontestable words of
the doctor ringing in my ears. “Penile
neuroma.” “Bad luck for you.” “Live
with the pain.”
My primary-care physician had rec-
ommended another doctor, whom I
will call Dr. Cortisone. After the razzle-
dazzle of Cornell, this doctor’s office
felt more familiar in a urological con-
text, smaller and lower ceilinged, its
walls festooned with quotes from Mai-
monides and a waiting room populated
with older Rothian Jews huddled over
copies of the Post while waging a final
battle with their prostates. The doctor
examined my penis and pronounced it
“That one guy from, you know, that thing.” wonderful. He even thought the ini-