We’ve all been there before, bros—bent over in pain, on the verge of tears and holding our balls as if squeezing them together will make that sharp feeling go away after something, somehow hit us below the belt.
While we might all be able to catch our breath and, sometimes, even laugh it off, Boston Bruins prospect Jake DeBrusk recounted a terrifying incident in which he was caught by a slapshot on his testicles in a game last year, which required surgery.
Per NEEI:
The whole story is that DeBrusk got hit in one of his testicles with a slap shot so hard that it inflamed to the size of a tennis ball and he fainted at the hospital before surgery could even be performed.
“It was the scariest thing, looking down and it’s just like, ‘Oh my god. What’s going to happen?’” DeBrusk said in a conversation with WEEI.com. “You’re 18 years old and you’re thinking to yourself whether you’re ever going to have kids, things like that. I freaked out.”
…
“The only thing I’ll remember about it is just the pain,” he said. “That’s the worst part about the injury, is how much it hurt, because I tried to get up. I went down and I didn’t know what happened, because you don’t feel it in that area. It goes up to your mid-section, so I thought my appendix burst or something, because I couldn’t move. It was an unbelievable feeling. I’ll never forget it. I tried to get up and I had to crawl to the bench. I had to crawl and they were like, ‘Get up, get up.’ I was like, ‘I can’t get up.’”
My goodness!
Rushed to the hospital, DeBrusk said that he was so loaded up on morphine and painkillers that he actually fainted before the surgery, with the doctors having to tell him that they hadn’t even started yet.
Per WEEI, even after surgery, the recovery was difficult for DeBrusk:
He couldn’t walk for a week, and though he was expected to miss up to two months, he returned after three weeks. DeBrusk admits that he “wasn’t even close” to being either healthy or properly conditioned to play, but that because it was his first injury and the team was struggling, he couldn’t stand to miss any more time.
Thankfully, Jacob DeBrusk returned to the ice and excelled—tallying 39 points in 37 games—but this is an experience that no dude should ever, ever, EVER have to live through.