A 38-year-old man arrived at a urological emergency department with a metal ring locked at the base of his penis, the shaft above it swollen, congested, and turning blue. He had put the ring on roughly 24 hours earlier, after a disagreement led to the cancellation of his marriage. He then drank heavily, fell asleep, and forgot about it.
By the time he woke the next afternoon, the swelling had already made removal impossible. Too frightened and embarrassed to tell his relatives, he spent hours trying to work it off himself. What followed in the operating room, documented in a case report published in Frontiers in Urology on April 29, 2026, reads less like surgery than like a demolition problem. The paper carries the title Till death, or the urologist, do us part.
