Delain bassist Otto Schimmelpenninck wins the award for most metal guitarist of the year as not only did he rupture a testicle while on stage in Birmingham last week he sucked it up (sorry, bad turn of a phrase) and went on to finish the show. However, he did not do so without suffering some seriously nasty pain that will make your own nuts hurt (if you’re a guy) just reading about it.
Wrote Schimmelpenninck on Facebook…
As some of you know, we use ‘streamer canons’, which shoot silver streamers into the audience, usually during The Gathering. We’ve been using this for ages without any problems at all, but in Birmingham things went wrong.
Since we were with 6 on stage instead of 5, there wasn’t really a standard position on stage. Normally, Charlotte would be stage center, Timo at the singing mic, I at the other side. Having Merel on stage with us meant everyone just had to pay attention at the moment the streamers would shoot. In my enthusiasm I did not pay attention, and happened to be VERY close when the streamer fired. It hit me from the back, in my genitals. Although pain was pretty bad right away, I was merely pissed off at myself for not paying attention. During the next song, pain got worse though, and I had the feeling I was bleeding. Pretty soon pain got to the point where I could barely stay conscious anymore, but for some reason I did manage to finish the show and even squeeze out some grunts!
After the show the damage was more obvious: my scrotum was the size of a big grapefruit and I was in a lot (yeah, really a lot) of pain. I was taken to the nearest hospital where after hours and hours of waiting, I was finally operated around 8:30 in the morning. It appeared here my left testicle had been ruptured as well as some arteries.
More than 500 milliliters of blood were removed from his scrotum and he won’t know for another six weeks whether he’ll lose his damaged nut or not.
Of course this was all caught on video (around the 3:30 mark) because I want you to suffer as much discomfort as I did in writing this story.
H/T Loudwire