on medfet
please note: this piece explicitly describes medfet (medical fetish) scenes, needle play, electroplay, speculum play, blood play, surgeries and surgery complications, including graphic descriptions of wounds and surgical techniques.
summer 2025. my nitrile-gloved best friend, a skilled needle top, has placed twenty seven needles in my skin; the most i’ve ever taken and some of them, at 18G, the thickest i’ve ever taken. when she commands me not to make a sound, i force my body to comply; i feel the sting, the tug, the glide, and, then, the break of the needle in me; i feel my pain and shock rise up in my throat and it wants to break through my body too but i am in charge. i don’t make a sound; i take it.
she bandages me. she holds me close after the scene is done. she tells me i did so well, she’s really proud of me. i see clearly, here, how love brings strength; how love like this allows you to make your body yours, again and again.
when my boyfriend fists my cunt later, i know he can see the needle marks; an arc of pinprick holes underneath my neck, sunshine breaking out from one side of my chest to the other.
there are two albums on my phone entitled “LEFT” and “RIGHT”. they contain 36 and 31 pictures, respectively. they span the period between october 26, 2022, and december 13, 2022. some of the pictures are taken 2-3 days apart, some of them are clusters of diligent daily snapshots. each one is of a wound — they start out, at first, a slit; teasing just a little bit of white yellow pink. they start to open more and more. soon, another wound opens (in the case of the left, just beside the original; in the case of the right, just above). soon, those wounds join together to create open maws in my flesh.
when i first noticed the little openings, my surgeon and her nurse told me, “they will get better but you need to be prepared for them to get bigger and worse before that happens”.
before i got surgery (my first ever surgery, if you don’t count the wisdom tooth removal where the numbing shots wore off and i felt the dentist rip a tooth out of my mouth), i did what most people i know would do: i joined subreddits. i spent weeks looking through posts, finding people who had had big chests like mine, trying to imagine their results on my own body. one thing that happens a lot on these subreddits is someone will post, terrified, about some small opening or potential complication they had found post-surgery. 90% of the time, the person will mention at the end of the post or in the comments that they’re barely a week or two post-surgery. before my own redesign, i (soon to be proven a fool) would read these posts and (in my head) be like, damn guys it’ll be fine! this is just what healing bodies do! it looks crazy now but it’ll get better!
when i saw it happening to my own body, when i went through boxes and boxes of gauze, slick or crusted against my chest with blood, pus, spit-out dissolving stitches that didn’t dissolve, whatever the fuck else is in our bodies, i was the same.
they took two months to heal fully — they got worse and bigger and grosser but they did heal.
i had spent the months after my surgery dealing with persistent gaping wounds; a significant rift between me and a close friend as a result of my needing regular surgical aftercare for that time; and, then, barely two weeks after the cavernous holes on my chest finally stopped weeping, i got fucking bedbugs. it was during this time (after i was healed) that i attended my very first play party — for two years now, i have been organizing play parties with the same collective that threw it.
at this play party, i was introduced to medfet. the name is pretty self-explanatory: if it’s medical, it can and will be fetishized. this applies to all kinds of medical examinations, enemas, urethral sounding and the use of catheters, needle play, electrotherapy, saline injections, even sometimes doing actual (often minor) procedures.
i watched someone get sounded by a nurse top in the medical room of the dungeon. i couldn’t stop watching the nurse’s hands; the way they slowly and skilfully guided the sounding rod into the person, the way they monitored how they opened up to the rod, metal in flesh being guided by flesh, making a snug home for a tool in another’s body. the nurse top spoke to the sub with a mix of care and curiosity: “how does it feel?”, “i think you can take a slightly thicker rod”, “i knew you could take it”.
after months of having my wounds regularly cared for and it causing a rift in an important relationship, i had been left feeling fucked up over care. being cared for had become crystallized in my mind as a burden i imposed on others, as something i forced them to do for me; an uncomfortable experience where every night, i had the feeling that i had plenty to be guilty for but no one to tell me it explicitly. but watching this scene, i was struck by how care functioned as a way of furthering curiosity, how curiosity was a form of pleasure.
i approached the nurse top afterwards, obviously quite shy. i told them i loved watching that scene and we talked for a while. they tried their violet wand on me; declared that i was a natural ‘electro slut’, which made sense since i had been using a TENs unit to ease the pain from my spinal disorders for a few years. in my head, a new thought; any device or tool used for the body can always be used for pleasure in some way.
we stayed in touch and a few months later, they invited me to a small medfet party they were throwing. we met up before the party and discussed a group scene; i wanted to be the patient, the subject, the experiment. i told them about my feelings over medical stuff after months of surgical complications. we negotiated outside on a park bench; a scene negotiation always a fine balance between what you know you want, what you know you don’t want and what neither of you could ever anticipate.
at the party, i was fed on by a medical leech that got fatter and fatter with my blood until she (i named her walter benjamin jr) was pulled off. she left a little three-pronged wound, her pincers a little star, that kept bleeding because the saliva of leeches contains a powerful anticoagulant.
someone who had brought their blood cupping kit offered to use it on me, take advantage of my already flowing blood. the pressure of the cup, filling up with blood, against my skin; purple red. after a while, they broke the seal and poured my blood, liquid and little thickened clots of it, into a bowl. unable to contain my salivating, i asked, “you guys wouldn’t be weirded out if i drank that, right?”. they laughed; obviously not. delicious and warm and all all all mine.
my group scene happened at the end of the party. i was tied up, blindfolded, electrodes placed on my inner thighs. electricity is searing, it almost feels like it’s touching your bones directly. it makes you seize and clench, giggle, struggle, it makes you have to let go. my cunt the point of focus for the electrodes; my thighs, flesh conduit, surging and seizing, passing the sparks into the middle of my legs.
me being me, i make a few jokes; cracks like, “hang on… i’m getting the sense that none of you are really medical professionals!”. they respond accordingly; i’ve been tricked, i really should have known that an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere wasn’t really a hospital, the sign was misspelled!
they had asked me if i wanted to try needle play before the scene; i have always been very afraid of needles so i said yes; maybe it’ll be less intense with so much else going on. four needles in a neat line on my upper arm; stitched through my skin, glinting; i noticed them go in but it wasn’t pain i noticed; maybe it was pain but i had given it another name; it was a flash, a tight and commanding spark that insisted on letting me know where it was, insisted on letting me know it was inside my body. my body, thus, affirmed it’s own existence; anchored to the needles.
they put a speculum inside my cunt. i don’t mean to brag but i do have a very deep cervix; every time i go to the gynecologist, they have to pull out the big guns. all these people—perverts, freaks, lovers of flesh and tinkering with it—were staring into me; my cervix putting on a show, it seems even my organs are exhibitionists.
later, one of the tops asks me if i’ve seen the 1986 film little shop of horrors, i say i haven’t, actually. they say, “i think you would like it, steve martin plays a sadistic dentist and it seems right up your alley!”.
pretty much exactly a year after surgery, i got a revision procedure done with the same surgeon to fix up my ‘dog ears’ and some deep indentations in my nipples. i was pretty nervous about it but even stronger was my sense of curiosity; i would be awake, obviously high as hell and not feeling a thing, during this procedure. i followed that feeling and realized i was thinking of the procedure like it was a medfet scene; it carried with it a familiar curiosity, vulnerability, fear, powerlessness. the feeling of being a subject to experiment on; a willing subject.
i did grapple with the ethics of this, at first; my surgeon had not consented to being in my scene, she wasn’t even aware that it was a scene to me, but this was not a scene in a dungeon and she was not my dom, i was not a sub. and there was nothing even erotic about it between us, i didnt find her or the situation arousing.
i'm obviously not saying we can have scenes with people that don't consent to it but what is a BDSM scene but a dynamic, a relationship—ephemeral as it could be—that you fuck with in your head? what is a BDSM scene but a re-imagining, an exercise whereby your mind tells your body what it is taking, how much it can take, what it must take, what it must do? in a lot of ways, i am still a newbie and i was an even fresher newbie then but, clearly, exploring kink in the ways i had begun to had given me a lot of ideas.
ultimately, i needed a way to get through that procedure; not because i'm squeamish about blood or anything, i'm really not (although having 3 inch long open wounds for several months will make anyone feel a little unnerved). rather, i needed a way to assert myself, ground myself, in a situation where, technically, i was not at all in charge; an operating room, under the influence of nitrous oxide, under the blade and needle and cauterizing wand of someone else. i just needed to feel like i had some control over what happens to my body.
so, i ask my surgeon about the tools she is going to use; their names, what they do. i ask her how they are sterilized; by machine, by hand, do they come sterilized already and you throw them out afterwards. she answers my questions. she shows me how to use the nitrous oxide, clocks me as a stoner; “you just hit it like you would a bong”. i exhale with my mouth off the mouthpiece; she says, “exhale into it, otherwise you’ll get me high, too!”.
as she’s working on me, i’m asking her more questions. “does it ever feel weird that you work opening people up every day?”, “at first, but you get used to it”. “what’s your least favorite surgery to do?”, “i don’t like working on peoples ears”. “what’s that smell?”, “oh, i’m cauterizing your skin. that’s the smell of burning skin”, “oh! wow! that’s kind of cool”. “can i watch you work on my nipple?”, “sure, but it might look pretty weird and bloody”, “i’m okay with that”. “i think i feel a tugging there, is that normal?”, “just take more hits of the nitrous. as soon as you feel anything, just take more”. “is it weird that my nipple healed that way?”, “every person heals differently”.
i live by a motto (one that i am heretofore copyrighting for my own use): EROTICIZE EVERYTHING (copyright talah).
that’s what medfet (kink in general) allows me to do; eroticize fear, eroticize discomfort, eroticize pleasure, eroticize pain, eroticize grossness, eroticize the smell of my own burning flesh in an operating room, eroticize not being allowed to make a sound as i am subjected to needles in my skin. turns out, a lot of this stuff was quite erotic to me already. turns out, i’m a pervert through and through.
this post is dedicated to the memory of my late leech, walter benjamin jr (she/her)
If there was ever a reason to tag @james factora on Substack
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