Have you read “The Creamation of Sam McGee“? It’s about a gold-chaser in the Yukon who freezes to death and makes his boss promise to burn his remains in an old ship. At the end of the poem, the dead man is discovered surrounded by raging flames, happy as a clam, claiming it’s the first time he’s been warm since leaving his childhood home.
Truer words have never been writ. Being cold is the worst. That’s why every explorer on earth wants to tackle the Amazon, but only a select few mess with the poles. Alex Brazier is one of these bold adventurers. He’s headed to the South Pole with Spear17 — a group of six British military reservists.
As you might imagine, getting to the South Pole like goddamn Ernest Shackleton is a chilly endeavor. So it’s not a huge surprise to discover that Brazier, the son of a government official, has developed a curious medical condition. It’s the sort of thing that adolescent boys joke about every year when the first frost arrives:
We found that for some reason I was getting particularly chilly in the nether regions, and there’s a phenomenon called Polar penis, which sounds hilarious but as it turns out incredibly unpleasant, and really quite painful and cold, so suffering a bit from this this morning.
Ahh yes, polar penis — the medical term for when someone is freezing his d*ck off.
Okay fine, it’s not quite that extreme. But it is cold as balls and Brazier has had to take drastic measures to correct the situation:
Fortunately, I now have a large thick woollen hat stuffed down in that region, it turned out to make all the difference.
The trek itself is actually a pretty extraordinary feat — the team is skiing 1100 miles without support. Each man is dragging a supply sled weighing nearly 400 pounds. It’s just the sort of thing that Brits who were in the military love to do, and considering that there’s a charitable tie in, you can’t fault them for it.
We just hope that Brazier’s medical situation corrects itself now that he’s found a fix. The young explorer is banking on it, saying the hat “will probably stay there for the next eighty days.”
