Approaching the size of a bowling ball.

I’m going against my better judgment to go into this story. There have been a lot of names from people – especially my wife – in the spirit of my “condition”. Names like “the uniballer”, “monoballmatic”, “halfaman”, and so on. It’s been like a trump card. Whenever she throws this out in a fight, we both crack up laughing and move on. It’s charming, annoying, and embarrassing all at the same time. But if I used good judgment, this website probably wouldn’t exist in the first place, so there’s that.

At the end of the day, most of my stories are about bad judgment anyway. If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ll find some cases of me using bad judgment and getting away with it (Choices, Cake Story). With others, I wasn’t so lucky (Shoemaker, Handicapped). This story, I was not so lucky in a big way.

As I have shared before, I spent some time working as a life guard. As I have also shared, at nights we would all hang out and drink after hours. There were a few employees, some friends, and a couple of older people (to get the booze).

In my second year on the job (a full year after Choices, by the way), one of my fellow guards was a girl named Mira Lawford. She was Pam Anderson circa 1992 for our small, New Jersey town. I’m sure my memory is playing games with me here, but I remember her being perfect in just about every way possible…but particularly perfect in the boob department. I was all swoony when she was around, for sure.

Mira was also on the pools diving team. She would hang around frequently and practice after hours. As you can imagine, this was a magical time for me to see her jumping up and down on the board, boobs bouncing all over the place. Every night seemed like it was filmed with the slow motion camera they used on Baywatch. It was very distracting.

One night after a few drinks, I was walking along the edge of the pool while Mira idly bounced up and down on the diving board. I was walking in a trance, more like floating, like the cartoon characters do when they smell something delicious…except I wasn’t floating. I was falling…into the pool. But it was okay because Mira was bouncing. Nothing could go wrong. And then…

I realized too late that only one foot fell into the water and the other stayed stationary on the side of the pool. With a sickening crack and a firecracker of pain, I landed squarely on the rounded edge of the pool, pinning my precious jewels between my body and the cold, cruel cement.

I can’t express the pain that I felt. When something happens to a guy’s nuts, the pain radiates around the entire gut area in a constant reminder from his body that shit ain’t right. I remember being overly concerned that water was going to get in my drink. I must have passed out immediately after because the next thing I remember, I was being pulled out of the pool by none other than Kira. I made a half-ass attempt to grab a mammary. Even in my severe state of shock, I was still mesmerized.

After the daring rescue, failed boob-grab attempt, and a lot of  questions I didn’t want to answer, I limped to the car to go home. I  took about 15 Advil and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up to what could be best described as a migraine in my balls.  There was a throbbing, constant pain from my groin all the way up to my stomach. It was a terrible pain. As terrible as the pain was, however, my teenage stubbornness was greater. I got up and hobbled my way to work.

I actually made it through the first day. Being a life guard is not that taxing. All you do is sit there. And I sat there, alright. I sat there in agony. Every 15 minutes, I moved in agony and then sat in another seat in agony. It was like sitting with a broken wine glass stuck between my legs. I did that for eight hours before going home in agony and falling asleep in agony.

Over the first 24 hours, I noticed that the size of my balls had doubled and turned into an ugly shade of purple. Thank god this was the early 90′s or there wold be a photo on Tumblr.  I took this turn of events as good news. It looked like everything was going to be okay. The kids are just bruised, no big deal! I let out a deep breath and thought that I just needed to get through the day and things (namely, my balls) would start getting better on their own.

Of course, as I’m sure you have guessed, that’s NOT what happened. At the end of the second day, my balls were roughly the size of a softball. The pain actually got worse. Now I was feeling like there were thousands of tiny weasels slowly circling the area between my knees and my stomach, eating the flesh with their sharp little teeth.

By the third morning, the pain was so intense that I was walking around hunched over. Finally noticing that something was wrong, my father asked and I told him what happened. He told me to drop my drawers so he could have a look.

There are very few times in my life that I saw my father truly horrified. This was one of them. By the time he saw them, my balls were approaching the size of a bowling ball and approximately the color of Barney with bright red varicose veins. He lost the color in his face and immediately took me to the doctor.

The doctor took a look and had the exact opposite reaction to my story than my father did. He laughed. He then told me that I broke a testicle and it would have to come out. The best part of the story – the doctor had a hard time getting this part out over all the laughter – was that if I had come in right away, he could have saved it. After he told me the only thing left to do was remove it, he chuckled as he left the room.

To this day I hate doctors. And Kira.