I spent the better part of the day and night at the ER today (not for my own care). Everything should be fine in the next day or two, but those several hours of inaction reminded me of the only time I’ve ever had to visit the ER for myself. Story below, from March 31, 2009.
(PS – the ladyfriend referenced here eventually became my bride)
Sick Balls
I woke up yesterday morning feeling like I’d just taken a knee to the giblets…that feeling you can never fully crystallize when describing it to a woman, yet every single man or boy on the planet knows intimately. Perhaps truly the only shared bond among all men – the acute understanding of that singular pain. I noted it immediately, but brushed it off. I assumed I slept on them funny or somehow elbowed myself in my slumbered awkwardness. I hit the shower, and while washing myself became aware of just how gingerly I was working my way around the troubled region. I silently chastised myself for whatever stupid decision I made in my sleep that led to this bizarre and uncomfortable start to my day.
On my way to work, I was hunkered down in my bucket seats and made a standard shift – a classic “no hands” rearrangement of the berries we’ve all done a million times while driving. This time the pain shot directly from my stones to my neurons, and while it only lasted a second, it was powerful enough to elicit a yelp. It was like some sort of James Bond torture scene we’ll never see where the villain or a cleverly-named henchman actually takes one of 007’s grapes between his thumb and forefinger and gives it a periodic pinch. I was starting to get nervous at this mysterious injury’s stamina.
On the average man’s graph of medical maladies and their corresponding calls to action (which ranges from “Smells Funky – Put a Band Aid on it” to “Bone Exposed – Consider Medical Attention”) this was registering somewhere around “Consistent Annoyance – Distract Yourself” by mid-morning. Midday drifted into early afternoon, and by this point I had resigned myself to the fact that this issue was now a condition, like loose ankles or tennis elbow.
On my way home, I snapped out of it and realized these were my biscuits that were ailing me ALL DAY. This wasn’t a headache or a stiff back…this required answers, research, resolution. Bring on the Googles! The information superhighway is truly a world of wonderment. With just a few clicks I was finding discussion threads – actual questions and answers on this very topic written by those who had been there before me. There were knowledge bombs going off all around me, and I soaked in the shrapnel of every theory, suggestion, and summary, including this one: “Sore testicles are one of your body’s clearest way of saying, ‘I have a problem.’” Indeed they are.
Descriptions which sounded pretty accurate to what I was experiencing started to spook me. Sometimes you don’t know what a word means, but you can infer quote a bit from the way it sounds. Testicular “torsion” was one of the front-runners in my self-diagnosis. Its symptoms matched mine, but torsion to me sounded like a word that describes metal gears grinding against each other, and I pictured my poor danglers gettin’ squished in between (turns out that’s not remotely accurate. I am not a doctor!). I thought I better take another visual inspection to see how things were developing. The last time I’d checked was around 6:30 PM. Things had looked a little off then, but those little pods shapeshift so much on their own that I didn’t get too alarmed at what I saw. By now it was getting on 10:00, and I’d been suffering this discomfort for a full fourteen hours. I was armed with the weapon of knowledge now, and I wanted to see what was what. So I dropped trou. I was slack-jawed. It was like there was suddenly a third being, two to three times the size of the others, growing out the side. I was almost ready for its head to burst out and gnash its teeth at me like something from a movie my brother would watch at three in the morning. Time to call the nurses line.
The woman on the other end of the phone couldn’t have been any sweeter. This ended up being the first of seven women to whom I’d describe my symptoms that night. We’ve probably all tried to explain what it feels like to take one in the stones to a female, but as I said before, it really is impossible to accurately characterize. I think the words just don’t exist right now. Regardless, she bled empathy over the phone, and somehow that made me feel better. She did say though that this is what they consider an “emergency situation,” and that I should NOT wait to see if things feel better tomorrow as I had planned, but rather I should get to an ER stat, provided I am “able” to do so. I hoisted up what felt at this point like the watermelons between my legs, and I made my way out the door.
My ladyfriend was nice enough to accompany me, and despite being a “man” I was thrilled that she insisted on joining. There are lots of reasons for this, including but not limited to (1) she is smarter than I and would be better at asking useful questions, (2) we were going to Abbott Northwestern, right in the heart of Shitsville; the stories I hoped to gain coming out of this would be much better corroborated by another, and (3) she is funny. This is always an asset, but especially so in otherwise gloomy scenarios. This proved valuable early on when she called her mother who was expecting her, and let her know she wouldn’t be seeing her because she was at the ER. Her mom naturally asked why, and she replied “Charlie’s balls are sick.”
I was both encouraged and dismayed at the alacrity with which they graduated me from the waiting room to the Big Show. I’d never been to an ER, but they operate as they did on M*A*S*H* – they’ve got a limited number of beds/rooms, so they assess the extent of everybody’s injuries, and grant service and access to those whose situation warrant it the most. The process of triage somehow got me in the door right away, which is great when you want to get in and out of the hospital as quickly as possible, but it was the first time that it hit me that maybe this is a bigger issue than I had considered. I mean there was an old dude there in a wheelchair who was bleeding in the lobby, and I was advancing to the next stage more rapidly than he was. Is my situation really more alarming than his?
Therein lies the true source of most people’s distaste for hospital visits – the unknown. Here I was, in the middle of the night, nads throbbing, unsure the root or extent of what damage I’d done. As with all doctor visits, I spent more time waiting than I did face to face with any medical personnel. I laid there in my backless robe, trying to replay in my head what I’d read earlier and speculating my fate. A very sweet nurse whose nametag read “Luv Bug” granted me five minutes of face-time and small-talk, though she admitted upfront this wasn’t really her area of expertise. She did answer my most pressing question though – why I was seen ahead of the others. Apparently the net result of torsion is the cutoff of circulation, which leads rather quickly to necrosis. In other words, the whole program down there gets shut down and some of the items I’ve grown fond of over the years get removed and discarded. Triage is a measurement of risk, and to put it in Luv Bug’s gentle, simple terms, the risk in my case was “loss of use.”
Eventually the only true doc on the staff for the night paid me a visit. She wasn’t there longer than 90 seconds, but she managed to poke, prod, and squeeze me into discomfort with the finesse of a drunk mime…all the while without even breaking a smile. She told me I’d need an ultrasound, and they’d come and get me for it once they were ready. She scurried out of the room like her garlic was burning on the stove.
It starts to get a little blurry here because this wait I think was around 45 minutes to an hour, which may not sound like an eternity, but was the middle of the night, my sack was distended, and I was getting groggy. My lady was kind enough to sit right by me all night, and didn’t complain once about the time or all the better things she could have been doing. When the nurse finally showed up to wheel me down to the ultrasound room, he was clearly making an effort to be talkative and cheery. In his curious attempt at frivolous, friendly chatter, he fielded three guesses at the extent of our relationship, each one sounding more ridiculous than the previous. “Are you guys cousins or something?” “Neighbors?” “Co-workers?” I finally just told him, and he said “oh….well, I never know, so…” as if somehow asking if we were married or dating would have been offensive in some way. People are weird. Cousins was your first guess? Really?
I naively believed that ultrasounds were reserved for pregnant women, but Larry, the Sonographer of the night, let me know that ultrasound technology was used throughout the hospital. One of the primary goals of using it on me was actually aural – they want an opportunity to listen to the blood flow, not just take a peek at what’s happening. Within minutes, it was party time. Larry lifted the transducer from its holster, lathered my swollen rocks with that jelly (warmed to 98 degrees), and the camera started rollin’.
Larry turned the screen towards me a couple times, but my untrained eyes didn’t take note of anything too spectacular – just a couple pulsing blobs colored sprightly in some areas and darkened in others. The good news, at least as Larry interpreted it, was that the uniformity of the colors suggested there was no torsion. This was not a final diagnosis, he noted, as the radiologists who actually read the sonograms are in Florida, and all my scans would be emailed to them as soon as we were finished. Good news is so fleeting in hospitals, it seems.
We shifted gears, and leapt headfirst into the audio portion of the presentation. While my eyes noted nothing of interest before, my ears perked up like a puppy’s when the mic was turned on. The blood was flowing through my scrotal walls like the rushing rapids of an industrial river. Larry agreed, and he deduced that instead of the feared loss of blood circulation and subsequent necrosis that accompanies torsion, perhaps I’m actually experiencing “hyper-anemic” activity – heightened blood flow. After getting whatever he needed, he shut down the system, sent off my slides to Florida, and started wheeling me back to the ER. This adventure seemed fruitful – Larry’s steady hand led us to the light: there was no torsion, there’d be no necrosis. I was enjoying the moment until Larry said “eh, but what do I know? The guys in Florida may totally disagree with me. I’m outta here after this…I’m exhausted.” Larry had been my first positive experience of the night, and he managed to kill all that goodwill in under five seconds. It crossed my mind that maybe he was just the janitor that got his hands on a lab coat and a key to the tech room, who was now trying to sneak out of the building before the word leaks out. 
Once again there was waiting…and waiting. Excessive waiting. We had no real data until the mysterious Florida guys called in their opinions. I don’t know what time it was anymore – somewhere in the 3:00 AM range. They even had to move us into another area of the hospital. We outlasted last call at the ER? Can you even shut down an ER? Evidently.
Eventually the doc made her way in to see us one last time. The news was good; Larry’s reading was accurate, whether he was truly qualified to make it or not. There was no torsion; just some sort of viral or bacterial infection. My prescription was ciprofloxacin or some such pill and bed rest. Again, her visit came and went without a smile and without much explanation. All the questions were asked after the fact, and she wasn’t there to answer them. My lady and I went home, my undersides still squishing with what remained of the hot jelly, and my knobs still swollen like baseballs.