The Man Who Got A Permanent Erection From a Tattoo & The World's Creepiest Caterpillar!

Confused by the post's title? Allow me to explain a bit. When I first started writing these lines I planned to write about a weird caterpillar. But moments later I changed my mind and thought to write about a medical oddity I  heard about recently. 

Being unable to choose between the two resulted in the post you are about to read. A post that somehow ended up to combine a weird case of permanently erect penis and a creepy looking caterpillar...

Enjoy:  

1# The Man Who Got A Permanent Semi-Erection From A Penis Tattoo 

Back in the 2012 there was an Iranian guy who had the cool idea to get his penis tattooed. I really don't get why people want to get their genitals tattooed or pierced, but oh well, who am I to judge. According to the published paper (Warning: Dick Pic) that documented his case the guy got a tattoo with the Persian phrase "borow be salaamat" meaning "good luck with your journeys".

Ironically, good luck wasn't what he got in the journeys to come! Instead, he got priapism. Here's the quick back story:

" A 21-year-old man, presented with partially rigid penis of 3-month duration. On examination, the penis was half rigid, with a tattoo on its dorsal surface, and a smaller tattoo on the glans (Figure 1). The patient initially stated that the tattoo had been created years ago, but later admitted that he had it created just before the occurrence of priapism. A traditional tattooist created the tattoo manually, using a handheld needle. Bleeding from deep penile tissue for several days complicated the tattooing."....  For 8 days after tattooing, the penis was painful, and thus there were no erections. After that, the patient noticed longer-than-usual sleep-related erections. This progressed, within a week, to a constantly half-rigid penis, day and night. [source]

After exploring all other possible etiologies and running all kinds of tests on the patient the doctors determined that the priapism was probably due to the tattoo, maybe because the needle was inserted too deeply or something. 

When it comes to priapism, there are two variations. Ischemic priapism and non-ischemic priapism. The main difference between the two is that in ischemic priapism, fresh blood stops coming in the penis and eventually the blood in the penis gets depleted of oxygen. With no intervention, the penile tissue gets seriously damaged, leading to all kinds of problems, from permanent erectile dysfunction to penile gangrene which certainly doesn't sound fun!

Fortunately, the iranian guy was somewhat lucky and got nonischemic priapism, which means fresh blood continued to come in. The doctors tried and gave him a shunt procedure to drain the excess blood but it failed. Since  there were no other complications other than having a semi-erect penis 24/7/365 the man decided to receive no further treatment.. He also claimed to have no regrets about the tattoo:

"The patient is currently able to engage in satisfactory sexual intercourse with his partner without any erectionenhancing treatment. The patient had no regret over the tattooing. He also reported no depression or any other psychological complication due to it " [source]

And now let's move to the second totally un-related topic of the day:

2# The Creepy Commander Caterpillar 

It's been a while since I posted a weird caterpillar on my blog. I believe the last one was Lexias Pardalis or the caterpillar that wanted to be a peacock.It's really cool, check it out! 

Unlike L. pardalis which is quite beautiful, today I have for you one of the creepiest ones you are likely to encounter, Moduza Procris:

Moduza procris caterpillar (credit)

Surprisingly, this ugly critter grows out to be quite the cutiepie:

Moduza procris butterfly (credit)

Commonly known as the commander, Moduza procris is a medium-sized butterfly found in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Here's a map with some self-reported sightings from Inaturalist in case you decide you want to go out and find one yourself:

There not something else interesting to say about this caterpillar, so if you want to learn more here's a link to wikipedia. And actually  I don't think most of my readers actually read my animal posts, I bet they just check the images and press the upvote button, please leave a comment if you do! So, since people only seem to want to look at photos, here have a last one before I say goodbye:

(credit)

See ya tommorow!