THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 51
tial Lubavitcher-inspired circumcision
had been done with care and did not
speak ill of the clumps of redundant
and now inf lamed foreskin. Dr.
Cortisone told me I did not have a
neuroma. He recommended three hot
baths per day and instructed me to
apply a dab of one-per-cent cortisone
cream to the stumps thrice a day to re-
duce inflammation. Additionally, he
thought the anticonvulsant drug gab-
apentin was too strong to be deployed
this early. “This is a minor issue that
will heal given enough time,” he said.
I was not a chronic-groin-pain patient
hobbled for life. The key was to forget
the pain and move on.
B
ack home, I stripped off my Eliz-
abethan collar and applied the first
dabs of cortisone. My penis stung, but
with a sense of joy. Everything was
going to get better. And yet Dr. Neu-
roma was a highly respected Cornel-
lian urologist, and when not respond-
ing to text messages he conveyed an
air of deep institutional knowledge. So
was it a neuroma or not? Would I heal
up to eighty per cent and no more, or
would I get to live a normal life? Why
did everyone have a completely differ-
ent approach to the issue? And what
was the issue?
Dr. Neuroma had told me that, when
it came to the male genital, MRIs and
other modern tools were “low yield,”
and that any further surgery might only
make matters worse. When I talked to
my friend Mary Karr, the poet and
memoirist, she was surprised by how
few diagnostic tools were available for
the penis. “Why can’t they slap it be-
tween two pieces of glass?” she asked.
“As fond as people are of dick, that I
can’t believe.” She was right. It startled
me how little literacy my otherwise lit-
erate male friends had about the organ.
When I mentioned the glans, some re-
sponded with a version of “You mean
the mushroom part?”
Things got worse. The cortisone had
dried out the affected areas, and my
pain was easing to some degree, but
my wounds were now covered with
long unsightly scabs. Dr. Cortisone
thought this was a sign of progress and
assured me that the scabs would fall
off during one of the long hot baths.
“You’re ninety-five per cent of the way
there,” he told me. Not completely con-
vinced by the doctor’s excitement, I
took some photos of my penis and sent
them to my primary-care doctor. “That’s
just horrible!” he cried. He told me to
return to the city and seek further care.
After consulting with a dermatol-
ogist and receiving yet another pre-
scription for lidocaine, I visited a highly
recommended and very
handsome surgeon who
happened to work down
the street from the derma-
tologist. He was a good lis-
tener and did not dismiss
my concerns. Dr. Hand-
some agreed with my pri-
mary doctor. The scabs
were a problem and their
very presence kept me from
healing. He made an anal-
ogy between my penis and the hot
molten magma building within a vol-
cano. (Dr. Handsome doesn’t remem-
ber this, but I recall at least one of us
drawing a volcano on a pad.) “If you
want,” he said, “I can get rid of the
scabs with just some Q-tips and some
saline solution.” True to his word, he
removed the thick scabs very gently
and with a minimum of pain. For the
first time since the initial surgery, I felt
that I was being cared for and looked
after. Is this it? I thought. Is this my
liberation? “In seven to ten days,” the
doctor said, “the new skin will grow in
and I expect you’ll feel great.”
I
n seven to ten days, I was in the
worst pain of my life. There were
some improvements. My penis was no
longer covered with scabs, and yet walk-
ing for more than ten minutes was im-
possible. I was losing my mind. I had
finally tried gabapentin, but it brought
about a mild psychosis during which
I wasn’t sure what was real and what
was not. The penis is an outcropping
of privilege in the male of the species,
but it is also a pleasure palace con-
stantly sending signals to the brain.
Having pain in the region amounts to
a never-ending genital tinnitus. It is
impossible to think of anything else.
I’ve always had a rational fear of
dying, but when I imagined a life with-
out being able to walk or swim or have
sex or travel or do anything without
pain or an Elizabethan collar, I won-
dered what it would be like to kill my-
self. I looked out the window and onto
the fresh snow gathered below and
considered the coldness of its eternal
compress. Shortly thereafter, I read
a BBC article about Alex Hardy, a
British man who had committed sui-
cide in 2017 after being circumcised
in Canada as a young adult. He did
not share his travails with
anyone after his operation,
but in a long farewell note
to his mother he wrote
that “these ever-present
stimulated sensations from
clothing friction are tor-
ture within themselves;
they have not subsided/
normalised from years of
exposure.... Imagine
what would happen to an
eyeball if the eyelid was amputated?”
That analogy perfectly articulated my
own experience.
M
ale circumcision is an important
part of Islam—two-thirds of cir-
cumcised men are Muslim—as well as
Judaism, though I can speak with a modi-
cum of knowledge only of the faith in
which I was brought up. My friend David
Fine, the rabbi, has a progressive outlook
on many issues, but he is staunch on this
subject. He tells me that a man need not
be circumcised to be Jewish; in the matri-
lineal tradition of the religion, a boy born
to a Jewish mother is automatically Jew-
ish, and yet, to Fine, circumcision means
that “we are God’s partners in creation.”
The Talmud specifies that, if a child’s
older brothers die of complications from
the procedure, the child should be spared
circumcision. In “Why Aren’t Jewish
Women Circumcised?,” Shaye Cohen,
quoting Rabbenu Tam, the well-known
twelfth-century Talmudist, writes that
even “a man who was left uncircum-
cised out of ‘fear of the pain of circum-
cision’ ... is not to be considered an
apostate since his ‘heart is directed at
heaven.’” If adult men may be excused
from the procedure because of their
fear, what are we to say of an infant
about to experience what is likely the
greatest pain of his young life? Or of a
seven-year-old who wants only to please
his father?
The Jewish religion generally seeks
to ameliorate unnecessary suffering
