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Last week, Denver7 news reported that five nurses at Denver Health Medical Center were suspended for allegedly mocking the unusually large package of a patient who died in their facility.

The nurses in question are alleged to have opened the man’s body bag to admire his big penis after the patient was deceased. Yikes.

When we heard this story, we had one question: how common is this sort of thing, really? We know that doctors and nurses are supposed to remain clinical and objective, but they’re human, too.

So are they regularly checking out their patients' junk? And if so, are they going so far as to show off their, um, unusual attributes to their colleagues? And is there specific ethical guidance given in the case of genital abnormalities, like a particularly large penis? To get answers, we asked people on the front lines: nurses, doctors, and medical students.

Broadly speaking, the answer is that it's pretty unusual for nurses to show a dead patient's penis to their co-workers.

“Honestly, we see so much of the body and so many variations that it all starts to blur together," a working nurse practitioner told Men's Health. "[A penis] becomes no more remarkable than a kneecap is to anyone else.” (Due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, most of the people we spoke with chose to remain anonymous.) Which is to say that despite what you might think of your penis, it is unlikely that there’s anything going on down there that would register with doctors and nurses.

This is, in fact, a fairly large part of medical experts' training: in medical school, nurses and doctors are shown the most extreme examples of graphic medical cases and deformities, so they are able to maintain their professionalism when confronted with these instances IRL. “In training, we were shown some particularly bad images,” said the nurse practitioner, “so you don't ever make your patient uncomfortable by looking shocked.” Additionally, since nurses are usually the ones doing bedside care and administering catheters, they're not super likely to be fazed by a large penis.

That said, it's not unheard of for doctors and nurses to cross professional boundaries.

Men's Health spoke with an attending physician with five years of experience who could recall numerous examples of his colleagues making inappropriate comments about patients' bodies. “I even remember being told that some guy had really swollen testicles" on an MRI, he said. Additionally, dark humor abounds in the ER and trauma surgeons often use such jokes as a coping mechanism to deal with the extreme nature of their work. So while what happened in Denver is unusual, it is quite possible that if you have particularly interesting genitalia, the subject will come up in conversation in a break room.

The question of whether it is appropriate to joke about a patient's genitals because more cut and dry after a patient dies. Respect for cadavers is taught from the earliest stages at medical school. Anna*, a medical student based in New York City, told Men's Health “our cadaver is our ‘first patient.’ We are supposed to treat them with respect." That said, she added, "anatomy professors will draw your attention to medical abnormalities. For example, my cadaver had such an abnormally small penis that my anatomy professor called him a 'she' by accident."

It turned out that this was likely due to a medical abnormality, and that the cadaver was likely intersex. "Once that was established, students from other tables were encouraged to come look at our cadaver," she said. In such cases, if a medical abnormality is involved, "it seems like it's fair game to ogle" for educational purposes, Anna said. "But I haven't heard of anyone going around talking about penis size or different vaginal shapes or anything like that. My understanding is that that would be considered highly unprofessional.”

So if you’ve got a particularly noteworthy set of genitals, it’s certainly possible your medical professional will discuss them with their colleagues out of earshot. But going so far as to show off a dead body for non-professional purposes is clearly out of bounds. As the nurse practitioner we spoke to said of the Denver nurses, “if they were doing what they were accused of doing, they likely deserve to be fired.”