The curtains were drawn to ensure maximum privacy as the attractive young woman lowered her hands towards my groin...

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to inject this straight into your penis. It may hurt a little..."

Now, ten years of weekend-night drinking had inured me to the normal perils of the beer injury. (One time I had slept soundly while my face took a pummeling from some sheep-bothering Kiwi hardnuts on the second floor of the late-night bus, only to wake up from my inebriated slumber because the blood clogging up my nostrils had stopped me from breathing.)

Incidents like this were easily bearable, the level of pain they caused being far outweighed by their usefulness as dinner party anecdotes. But this was different. Alcohol had led me to disregard the well being of my genitals, and I was about to pay the excruciating price.

It had happened during a routine visit to the Lockstock & Barrel pub. As I answered the call of nature, I heard the shout for lastcall ringing out. With one more for the road in mind, my concentration on the task at hand slipped for a crucial moment, and, rushing to return to the bar, I failed to restore the whole of my penis to its rightful place. Zipping up my jeans, I caught a sizable chunk of foreskin in the teeth of my fly.

At first, I wasn't too alarmed at this development. It's happened to us all before, and is usually no problem - if a little undignified - to undo. However, as I tugged at the zipper, the skin became even more firmly lodged between the sharp prongs of metal. The more I struggled, the tighter the grip of the zip became, and then blood began to pour down my trouser front at an alarming rate.

Sobering up rapidly, it became clear that, without medical attention, I was facing a catastrophe of John Wayne Bobbitt proportions. Aware that a re-entry to the bar area with my hands and crotch dripping with blood might provoke some unwelcome questions as to what exactly I had been getting up to during my extended visit to the toilets, I staggered to the public telephone down the road from the pub and called an ambulance.

Once at Emergency, I was spared the embarrassment of declaring my ailment to the hospital receptionist and was ushered straight to a cubicle by the ambulancemen on the grounds that I had already lost too much blood to be kept waiting.

Unfortunately, the doctor's early attempts at extricating my knob from its predicament using brute force were no more successful than my own. So, responding to my wails that I would rather die than take any more such punishment, she elected to cut the zip off with scissors.

This tactic, and the ensuing jab of anesthetic, relieved the physical suffering, but only increased the mental torment. Thanks to the Novocaine, my entire waist area was now a foreign country, and although I could see it turning blue as the doctor pulled away the last remaining teeth of the zip, there was no longer any connection with the nerves in my brain.

Finally I fainted, the torture of seeing my poor manhood being wrenched apart - and by a woman, to boot - proving too much for me to bear. When I awoke several hours later, the first sensation I felt was a desperate need to urinate, no doubt caused by the several unevacuated pints of lager which lay in my bladder.

"I've got to piss," I whispered to a passing nurse. She sniggered and then, recovering her composure, pointed towards the gents at the end of the corridor. As I got up, I felt a sharp tug at my waist as what formerly passed for my love truncheon made a determined beeline for the floor. Although it was no longer attached to the fly of my jeans, my knob, it appeared, was now made out of lead.

In fact, the beating it had taken in the struggle to set it free had caused it to double both in length and girth. Now, under normal circumstances, having a penis that was seven inches long and two inches wide when flaccid is the first, second, and third request I would make to the genie of the magic lamp.

However, on the occasion, had every nurse in the hospital offered to suck me back to health, I would have had to turn them all away. It is typical of my luck that the first and only time I could justly claim to have the largest johnson in the entire South East Asia region was the time when even the thought of an erection was enough to make me faint.

Reaching the urinal, I managed gingerly to point my throbbing member in the right direction, shielding my embarrassment form the two gentlemen in dressing gowns on either side. I was, however, totally unprepared for the embarrassment that was to follow.

The needle injections I had been given to protect me from the final battle between doctor and fly had, it appeared, left holes in my plumbing. So instead of being able to empty my bladder forward into the bowl, liquid flew out at all angles covering a 150 degree radius, drenching the entire toilet floor. For the next two weeks, I was doomed to be a human sprinkler system.

Fortunately, however, a prolonged stay in the hospital was not required. After a brief once over by the duty house officer - who warned me, unnecessarily, to steer clear of all kinds of sexual activity for the next few weeks - I was deemed fit to work and ready to be dispatched home.

But there was just one more hurdle to overcome in my quest to retain my dignity. the swollen pound of purple flesh attached to my groin area could not, in it current giant form, be housed in normal sized trousers. Only tracksuit bottoms were loose enough to painlessly accommodate such a monster snake.

Given that my workmates were the kind of people unlikely to miss out on an opportunity to make my mishap more of a sore point than it already was, I had to pretend that hobbling around in outsize clothing was the result of a cartilage injury sustained during a weekend rugby match.

Eventually the holes in my helmet did close, and before long I was marveling contentedly as the size of my pecker shrank by the day. The only memento of the episode I have now is a jagged brown scar where the skin was ripped, making it look as though my knob was once attacked by a weasel. Oh, and the fact that I now only wear trousers with a button fly.