Among the myriad pleasures of certain television series’ are the new terms they introduce into your lexicon. Law & Order: SVU taught us “exsanguination” and “ligature marks,” while The O.C. gave us the gift of “Chrismukkah,” which hit particularly close to home for this Jew-Catholic hybrid. The season premiere of the outrageous TLC docuseries Sex Sent Me to the ER brought two terms to my attention: “vajaycial” and “transient monocular blindness.”
If you’re not familiar with Sex Sent Me to the ER, well, that’s understandable. There’s a lot of television out there, and the premise is pretty insane. The series features real-life couples delivering testimonials about sexcapades gone terribly awry, which are then dramatized by “actors” whose heightened re-creations boast cheeky, telenovela-quality thesping. Past episodes have depicted a 440-pound virgin man crushing his girlfriend during intercourse to a skydiving mishap. The second season of Philip J Day’s show premiered on Jan. 2, and featured three sex-filled scenarios that landed people in the emergency room: a vajaycial screw-up, a horny pilot who’s lost his vision, and sex during the zombie apocalypse.
The first world-beaters are Josh and Amber, a couple of six years from the South (most of the people featured on the show are white and from the South, it seems). And they like having sex. A lot. “Our sex life is pretty adventurous, like, I’m one hundred percent sure I got pregnant with my son on the back of a four-wheeler,” Amber says.
One day, Amber stumbles upon an article in a tabloid rag about a “vajaycial”—a rejuvenating facial for one’s vagina. However, instead of seeking the help of a vajaycial pro, she decides to go DIY. Since you first have to steam the area for 15 minutes, she grabs a pot from the drying rack, fills it with water, and boils it. Then, she places the pot on the ground in the middle of the kitchen and, standing directly over it, proceeds to crouch over it, spread eagle. Right then, Josh walks in. He’s startled, of course, but soon gets into the act, mixing the vajuvenating products—honey, egg whites, coconut lotion (in place of coconut oil)—in a bowl he’s retrieved. He proceeds to act as her “sous chef” (his words), rubbing the concoction on her… and in her.
“We’re rubbin’ on each other and gettin’ really into it,” Amber recalls. “I know when someone makes you hot it’s normally a good thing, but that wasn’t this situation.”
Amber’s downstairs area is on fire, so she sprints over to the sink and begins spraying water into her vagina, which only makes it worse. “My labia was just so swollen and red… it was just so bad,” she says.
The couple rushes over to the ER and explains the situation to the doctor, who’s never heard anything like it. Doc tries a bunch of remedies but nothing’s taking. Then, Josh the dummy realizes that he hadn’t washed the bowl he’d mixed the lotion in—his “chili bowl,” where he makes his famous habanero pepper-infused chili. Translation: Josh entered his wife with habanero pepper-infused fingers. This is apparently a big no-no because capsaicin, a molecule found in chili peppers, binds to one’s sensory receptors in the skin or eyes, causing a very intense, burning sensation.
But hey, all’s well that ends well, according to good ol’ Amber: “So come to find out, the fatty part of milk works as a kind of detergent for the oils in peppers,” she says. “They give me a full-blown milk bath. Like, I am submerged in milk. I’m so happy! It’s a do-it-yourself remedy for a do-it-yourself project that goes awry!”
Oh, Amber. Bless her.
The second segment followed couple of one year Jimmy and Krystle along on a 5K zombie run, the objective being to finish the race without getting your flag snagged by the undead. In order to get Jimmy to participate, Krystle gives a little incentive. “I knew he had this zombie apocalyptic fantasy, in a way,” she says. “Who wouldn’t want to have sex when there are zombies all around?” adds Jimmy, who is very strange (and also Southern). “It’s kind of like you get the thrill of the danger! We gotta repopulate the Earth!”
So, during the race, they find a vacant bus and begin having sex inside it. “So, you know, we’re doing our business and I hear moaning and groaning,” says Jimmy—when all of a sudden, a zombie bursts its head through one of the windows of the bus. “I got scared and I smacked my nose into [Jimmy’s] chin,” says Krystle. Blood is everywhere. Still, Krystle is determined to finish the race—but once she’s done, realizes that not only is her nose severely broken, but she’s suffering from a septum hematoma, and the nose must be re-broken in order to be fixed.
“I was feelin’ pretty guilty at this point because my fantasy had been fulfilled, but poor Krystle was, like, mangled,” says Jimmy, who’s a few beers short of a sixer. “In the end, we learned that while the competition was fun and everybody wants to finish, it was more important that we were together, and that we enjoyed each other’s company.” Also, don’t have sex in the middle of a zombie 5K, but hey, who’s counting?The final—and most intriguing—tale from Sex Sent Me to the ER’s Season Two premiere involved an unnamed commercial airline pilot and his wife, as recounted by Dr. Pedram Shawd, M.D. As soon as Dr. Shawd enters the examination room, the wife is straddling her husband. He claims that he went temporarily blind in his left eye—known as transient monocular blindness (TMB)—and it took five minutes for his sight to return. To make matters worse, he exclaims, “I have to be in the cockpit tomorrow morning.”
After running a series of tests, Dr. Shawd determines that the pilot’s eyes check out fine, so he performs some tests on his heart, and manages to find a bit of plaque in the carotid artery that could be restricting blood flow to the brain. But what caused the buildup? Dr. Shawd has the pilot run on a treadmill to see what happens when his heart rate is elevated. Then, he decides to step out of the room for a few minutes. When he returns, the couple is at it again, with the wife straddling her husband, leading the doctor to think: “I know it’s a long shot, but since this couple is all over each other, I wonder if his blindness has to do with sex.”
Then, the pilot confesses to Dr. Shawd that, yes, he hadn’t seen his wife in a while so as soon as his flight landed, she met him at the airport and they had sex. Then, he went blind for a bit.
“Transient monocular blindness is not very uncommon,” says Dr. Shawd. “What is uncommon about it is when it’s due to orgasm. During orgasm, blood that should flow into the eye gets redirected to the genitals, temporarily cutting off blood supply to the retina, causing blindness.”
Then he pauses, and adds, “When sex sends you to the ER, make sure you’re honest with your doctor.”
Words to live by.