someone under sixteen years of age can be on some form of contraception.
8. Being on the pill doesn’t mean she’s ‘easy’. In one class, half the kids answered ‘true’ or ‘maybe’. I also explained that not all people who take oral contraceptives take it for that purpose.
9. There are always, at least, two or three who say two men or two women cannot love each other.
10. Even those from stern religious backgrounds often feel that you shouldn’t wait until marriage before having sex. I do say there is no right or wrong answer for this.
11. There are always some ‘maybes’ and the occasional ‘true’, but they were shocked to discover that people can have HIV and have never slept around.
12. A lot of kids think oral sex is safe; often over half the class answer ‘false’ or ‘maybe’.
13. While condoms do protect against HIV and STDs, a lot of it comes down to good technique. None of the kids knew that nothing is 100 per cent.
I had some very interesting results. The information gave me some idea of what they needed to know, and in some cases, showed me how they might need to change their attitude. Of course it’s not for me to unduly influence, but boys who genuinely believe a girl doesn’t always mean ‘no’ when she says it, could end up in a lot of trouble one day.
Rachel burst into my office, gasping for air. She had run all the way from the school theatre to get here. It’s not far, but it’s uphill.
‘Sir, you have to come quick, please, it’s urgent.’
I asked what was wrong, but Rachel just grabbed my hand and began pulling me out of the office. ‘Please, sir, just come quick … Kurt is hurt real bad, there’s blood everywhere.’ I let her lead me out of the office, making sure to bring my emergency bag.
As Rachel lead me through the theatre, past the empty stalls, and behind the stage, I wondered where the hell I was going to end up, and what they’d been doing. I’d never been backstage before, but Rachel knew exactly where she was going. She lead into the boys’ changing room.
Kurt was in a bad state. He was lying on the floor, next to the sink. His pants were down around his ankles, and there was blood on his head as well as on the floor, although I couldn’t tell exactly where all the blood was coming from. There seemed to be more than one source of bleeding. Fortunately Kurt was conscious, although as pale as a sheet.
‘What’s wrong, mate, what happened?’ I asked as I knelt down beside him. He lay still but turned his eyes towards me.
‘I feel shit,’ he croaked as he tried to sit up, but I told him to stay lying until I’d had a chance to examine him.
He tried to pull up his pants and I helped him cover himself, while Rachel looked away, her face reddening. ‘I was standing up, then woke up on the floor,’ he said. I asked what he was doing at the time, and he glanced at Rachel and gave her an almost imperceptible nod.
‘We were …’ Rachel stuttered, ‘we were doing, you know … it. And then he screamed, and there was blood, down there. His … his dick was bleeding.’ Kurt was feeling a bit better and again tried to move to a sitting position. I told him to lie back down as I needed to make sure his head and neck were fine but he sat up anyway. ‘It’s so fucking sore.’ I assumed he meant his head, but he very slowly put his hands in his pants and gently cradled his penis.
‘Mate, what have you done?’ I managed a quick glance and it looked a mess.
‘She broke it.’
Rachel began sobbing.
‘I’m sorry, I never meant to, I’m sorry.’
‘Is it gonna be OK, Doc?’ asked Kurt.
I imagined saying ‘No’ to make sure Kurt got the most out of the experience, but my usual kidding around didn’t seem the best course of action. There was a lot of blood down there and while I couldn’t make out what exactly was wrong, I felt sure it wouldn’t be serious – simply because I didn’t have the imagination to come up with something overly worrying that could have happened.
In hindsight he could have had a fractured penis, something I’d only read about being possible, and had no idea what such a thing would look like! With all the blood I felt certain Kurt’s problem was probably more superficial.
Kurt denied any neck or back pain, although he did have a three-centimetre laceration above his right eyebrow. I wrapped a bandage around his head and walked him slowly back to the health centre whereupon I received the whole story.
‘We didn’t warm up, it’s my fault,’ Rachel began while Kurt lay back on the couch, still cradling his manhood as he moaned in agreement.
‘Yeah, it’s her fault.’
They’d snuck off to the theatre changing rooms for a quickie between classes. ‘The floor was so gross,’ Rachel said, ‘so we did it standing up.’
‘She split my dick in half,’ Kurt cut in. I hoped that wasn’t the case. It was time to take a proper look at it, so I gloved up and shooed Rachel out the room.
‘Softly, Doc. Softly.’ Kurt gently lowered his pants and tenderly laid out his willy. The poor thing looked like it had been through a war, blood and all, but I could see the problem. I breathed a sigh of relief.
‘It’s OK, you’ve only split your foreskin in half.’
‘What do you mean only split it in half,’ Kurt exclaimed, his voice cracking, close to tears. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said ‘you’ve only’, as I’ve never had such an injury, especially considering the pain had been so bad that he had a vasovagal episode, which caused the faint, whereupon he hit his head against the sink on the way to the floor.
Most fainting by young healthy people is vasovagal. The vagal nerve runs from the head through the middle of the body. When this nerve is stimulated, as it was by the pain from his split foreskin, it slows the pulse down – a lot – from 80 beats per minute to zero beats per minute. Only briefly, of course, otherwise you’d be dead. But the subsequent drop in pressure allows gravity to take effect, and your blood pressure ends up in your boots. The good news is that when you hit the ground, you end up in a lying position, which helps the blood pressure return to normal. There are many things that stimulate this nerve, and pain is a very common one.
Poor Rachel had received such a fright at the suddenness of Kurt’s collapse that she thought she had ‘shagged him to death’.
Kurt’s mood slowly improved, although he still spent the next two hours cradling his penis. He was nauseous, pale, and would need four stitches to his forehead.
We eventually had him reviewed by the village doctor. His bleeding parts were patched up and he was kept in the health centre for the night for observation.
While Kurt may not want to speak of his experience for a few years … I’m sure when he’s older both he and Rachel will relish retelling the story of how he was almost
