Gym weight cut from man's genitals

In what firefighters described as a once-in-a-lifetime call, officials with the Costa Mesa Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue squad were summoned early on Tuesday morning to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach to save a man’s penis from perishing.

The man, whom authorities declined to identify, other than saying that he was in his 50s, had apparently put his penis through the hole of a steel, ring-shaped dumbbell weight fastener, two or three days earlier.

The device got stuck, and he couldn’t remove it. The penis had blackened and swollen to five times its normal size, authorities said. In order to remove the ring, firefighters had to use a saw to cut through it.



“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.

The man thought the weight from the steel object would make his organ longer, but what he did to it almost rendered it useless, authorities said. The steel collar-like fastener cut off circulation to the man’s penis, said Capt. Dave Kearley. As a result, blood could not flow out of it, and it swelled to the point that the man couldn’t remove the ring, Kearley said.

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.