TMI Thursday: The tale of the tesicle

In my junior year of high school, while playing in a varsity soccer game, I had a ball kicked into my groin and sustained testicular torsion.

In layman's terms, a soccer ball whacked my junk and spun my balls around like Loony Tunes.

I was playing midfield, backing up a forward, and we were trying to score. A defensive player got the ball and tried to give it a big kick down field so I jumped in the air to block it.

I was expecting it to have more altitude so rather than hitting me in the chesticles it hit me in the testicles.

For those of you without a pair of your own let me give a brief explanation of what happens when you get hit in the nuts. It's like being punched in the stomach really hard, having the wind knocked out of you and having your guts squeezed by a big invisible hand all at the same time.

I had to leave the game. But after about 15 minutes I was good to go back in and I finished the game and went home after. It didn't feel any different than being hit in the junk had before but at about 11 p.m. that night I woke up screaming. I felt around south of the border and was greatly alarmed with what I found. My Bruce Banners had turned into incredible Hulks – and not in a good way.

It felt like I was being tortured by invisible loan sharks for a gambling debt I didn't owe. Bowleggedly, I made my way down the hall to my parents' room and knocked on the door.

"Mom, my balls are really swollen ... I mean, this is bad. I-I think I need to go to the hospital," I said.

"Ugh. Take some Ibuprofen and put some ice on them Nick," she said.

"MOM! Ice isn't going to cut it! Something's wrong! Like REALLY WRONG!" I was getting hysterical because I felt like I was about to pass out from the pain.

"Furr-dama. He just wants to get out of work in the morning," my step dad said (I worked on our farm in high school. Also, he's Dutch and uses weird curse words).

"Yeah Will," I said. "I took a meat hammer to my junk so I could call in sick tomorrow."

"OK. Well let's see them," my mom said.

Any sense of propriety I had went out the window about the time my nuts grew to the size of ripe mangos so I dropped trou and showed them two possible speed bumps in their road to grandparenthood.

"Oh, honey!" Gasped my mother. "I'll get my keys."

Two ambulance rides, a lot of morphine and one testicle surgery later I was the relieved owner of two tender but otherwise undamaged nuts.

So that's my harrowing TMI Thursday, the tale of the testicle edition ...