As you might imagine, being a writer on the internet means you get a bit of email. Being a writer on the internet about sex gets you a lot of email. Sometimes one shows up which absolutely must be shared, with permission of course, with the whole class. And so it is with an email entitled The Runaway Romp: A Tense True Tale of Toy Trouble, originally sent to Epiphora, which induces more than just a little lost-buttplug deja-vous. Maddie ((As the author has asked to be called)) writes:
Over the last year or so I decided to explore butt toys. For years my interest in them had been merely academic, but now I found myself wanting to try them. My first purchase was a medium Pure Plug. Then it was on to the Bootie. Both toys were highly enjoyable: I love inserting a cool Pure Plug on a hot summer day, or a warm Pure Plug when it’s cold out; and the Bootie is just pure silicone good cheer for my butt.
And so it was inevitable, I guess, that my attention would soon be drawn to the Romp.
Well, why wouldn’t it be? I mean, just look at those things – they’re gorgeous! I’ve always prized toys that are beautiful as well as fun, and from all the pictures I’d seen and the reviews I’d read, the Romp scored high marks for both. I did have some reservations about the base and how secure it would be. I’d read Lorax’s tale of woe, but it seemed to be the exception rather than the rule, and I wasn’t planning to use the toy during sex, so I wasn’t too on the fence about it, but still using this and other toys have gave me unexpected orgasms so I was really happy with them. Then NobEssence had a sale, and that yellow heart wood was calling to me… with a click of the mouse, my fate was sealed.
When the Romp arrived, I couldn’t bring myself to insert it at first. Instead, I kept it nearby for the first 20 minutes or so just to admire its beauty. But I soon became impatient and lubed up the Romp and inserted it. After walking around for a bit, I sat down to work at my computer. The handle did make itself felt while sitting, but I shifted position a couple times until it wasn’t in the way. In retrospect, I believe I can pinpoint the moment that things began to go awry, although at the time I didn’t think anything was wrong.
After a while I began to feel some discomfort – almost like cramping. I decided to try wearing the Romp with the handle facing forwards to see if that would help. But when I reached for the handle to remove the toy, it wasn’t there.
Ohhhhh, shit.
My ass is neither a teleportation device nor a magic portal to other dimensions. I hadn’t been wearing the toy for long, or for any activity where I might have removed it and forgotten. There was no question where it had gone to. I probed carefully with a fingertip… yep, there it was, lurking just inside its hidey-hole like a goddamn conger eel. Well, that wasn’t so bad; it was reachable, surely I could remove it without much fuss. But, also like a conger eel, it withdrew further into its lair when I attempted to hook my finger around it.
Now, I am not one for panicking. I dislike freakouts. I have also been an EMT for many years and, as I like to tell the new techs, 80 percent of EMS is simply staying calm. So I didn’t panic. But I was scared. What if I couldn’t get this thing out? How much further would it travel, and how quickly? (In a weird flash of anxiety-fueled anthropomorphizing, I pictured an adventuresome Romp in its new base camp in my rectum, stocking up on water and moose jerky: “There’s still plenty of daylight left. If we set out now, we can reach the transverse colon by nightfall!”) Was I really going to have to go to the ER? I didn’t have time for that now, but how much worse would the situation get if I waited?
I was not too nerve-wracked to appreciate the irony of my predicament. Years and years of buying only safe designs and body-safe materials, preaching the toy safety gospel to others, and now here I was with a high-end butt plug on the loose inside my large intestine and no real plan for getting it out. I had no tools for dilating, no forceps for grabbing, and trying to improvise something from household materials would practically guarantee a trip to the ER.
In the end, it was the very thought of an ER visit that fired my resolve to safely retrieve the toy myself. As I mentioned before, I have been an EMT for a long time. That means I am known in the ER of every nearby hospital. Coming in to have a rogue butt plug removed would mean embarrassment today and very likely a gauntlet of smirks, giggles, and whispers that would follow me for many tomorrows. It was way more bullshit than I was willing to put up with.
As a woman of a certain age, I can safely claim that I was reading Susie Bright when you were still sitting in a high chair throwing Cheerios at the dog. In one of her early essays on the perils of unsafe butt toys, she’d mentioned simply bearing down to push a lost toy out. I tried this, praying that Susie’s advice had not been disproven in the intervening decades, and eventually the Romp did return to where I could get a grip on it and pull it out. Whew!
The relief of not having to go to the hospital was overwhelming. My butt felt pretty grumpy after all that fuss, so I gave it the rest of the day off. In the meantime, I decided I was not going to try the Romp again without some kind of safety measure in place. A thin silicone collar around the neck of the toy with a strong retrieval string, a la the Luna Beads, would have been ideal. I did not have that, so I settled for a homemade retrieval string, which you can see in the attached picture. Then I put the toy back in its box and called it a day. The experience had spooked me, and every now and then for the rest of the day, I would get nervous and have to reassure myself that the toy was out of me and safely in its box. No matter. Tomorrow would be a new day (it was), my courage would return (it did), the Romp and I would try again (we will).
And you see, that’s the thing with the Romp. It’s so good that despite not one but two tales of the Curious Incident of the Romp in my Butt, we keep using it. I still wholeheartedly endorse it, just as long as you have all the facts. The Romp is just so perfect that otherwise sensible human beings will risk an awkward trip to the ER, just for the pleasure.
Sex utensils mentioned in this post- the Njoy Pure Plug, the FunFactory Bootie, LELO Luna Beads, and of course the infamous NobEssence Romp are all awesome and available from the fine folks at SheVibe
