So, I’ve got a bunch of dysfunctional friends. I’ve just spent an hour and a half trying to calm down a buddy of mine, because his freaking out won’t do him any good. He has, what he describes (and I haven’t seen) as what looks to be 8-10 bug bite sized lumps on his penis head.
I don’t know why he asks his web design buddy about this, but he does, and so I do my best to help but I stress he should go see a doctor about these.
He says he’s only had unprotected sex with his girlfriend of a year, though he did have sex with another girl (using protection) a few weeks ago. (Relationship issues aside, he says she’s okay with an open relationship.) The bumps aren’t blisters, and they don’t seem to be warts (my two ideas) they just look like bug bites.
He says they first appeared the beginning of the weekend and they have had a few more show up, but they’re size seems to be shrinking over the past two days. He doesn’t experience any pain, and says they do itch like bug bites.
Could it be he just got bit by bugs while sleeping or something? Or is it something more? He says he’s going (and I’m going to make sure) he goes to the doctor tomorrow or as soon as he can.
Any chance of: new soap, new laundry detergent, new fabric softener, new underwear-new anything to which he might be having a dermatological reaction?
Thanks for this thread. Now I have an image of the old 1970’s Off! bug repellent commercial where the demonstration shows an unsprayed arm being thrust into a box containing hungry mosquitoes, just reprised slightly differently.
Um … it just seems really odd that one would be attacked savagely by biting insects in that one small area of his body. When did the bugs get access to it? Does he sleep in the nude on top of the covers? Does he sleep fully clothed but let Mr. Happy out to get some air? Did he poke it into an ant hill?
Sure an allergic reaction could be possible but it sounds more suspicious of something … suspicious. Yeah, he should see a doctor.
You wouldn’t believe the number of things that patients describe as “bug bites”, though. Everything from skin cancer to skin infections, and everything in between, practically, can look like a bug bite. Dude needs to see a doctor.
IMO, there’s something he hasn’t told you - I don’t quite know what, but I’ll bet he’s not being completely candid, even though it might seem that way.
(Ah. So I’m to be a knowledgable source of info on scabies… of course, I’m way too familiar with fleas, poison ivy, chiggers and such, too. Guess you all want to hang out with me, eh?)
Could be scabies, I guess. He’ll sure know in a few weeks if it starts spreading and itching like mad, but I really hope he doesn’t go that long. He needs to see a doctor.
I’m here to report that YES, you can get scabies without having sex with someone. The placement of the little critters in the OP makes that, um, questionable, but it can be done.
Yes, yes, you can get them without having sex! They’re mites, not a germ/virus. I caught them as a kid from my female cousin after sleeping with her in her bed. Yowza, talk about itch. Mine were mostly on my hands for some strange reason, between my fingers. I scratched myself raw before finally going to the doctor.
He’s been in the woods/grass in areas (like the U.S. South) that have harvest mites (‘chiggers’); and
the bites are spread across other areas that were covered by clothes at the time of exposure; and
he’s had chigger bites before, and these are similar.
Chiggers tend to crawl upwards until they reach an area underneath clothing, so if one was wearing shorts, it is definitely possible to have bites on certain sensitive areas. But in that case, bites would be spread out over the whole waist-to-top-of-shorts area.
So my buddy went to Planned Parenthood, he said that the nurse was genuinely unsure what exactly it was. Either bug bites as he had thought, or maybe an allergic reaction as some suggested. They gave him some meds and he went ahead and got tested for Herpes and Syphilis I think… in any case, he feels much better.