What is That?!

We had a very pleasant trauma patient who needed to go to the CT scanner for a fall. I had adjusted the blanket on him and exposed him during the trauma exam to uncover a large metal ring around his genitals. Like this:

Between the nurses, techs, and doctors, none of us had ever seen a penile ring before, but we all kept extraordinarily professional faces and demeanors despite this fact.  As soon as people walked around the curtain, however, their faces changed into varying expressions of "What IS that?"

Finally, a male nurse mustered up the courage to ask, "so why do you wear it? What is the purpose of wearing one?"

"Purely decorative purposes." Mr. Cockring smiled. "I can remove it if you like."

He took our intrusion into his personal life with such a great sense of humor and grace.
It made for a good experience in the trauma room in face of the several homicides (shootings and stabbings) that also came in during the course of the night.

Also, because we had three extraordinarily good-looking male trauma nurses that day who did not want to be hit on, I helped Mr. Cockring with various tasks throughout the evening. We had a few inspirational conversations with his partner about their travels together around the world.  They were just really lovely, open-minded and intellectually curious people.

Then, I tried to troll the security officers by hiding the ring in the bag of valuables to be locked up, but they chased me out of their office.

S
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_ring
I looked it up later- apparently, they are also used as a sort of tourniquet to engorge the area even more
 so.  Interesting.