Third grade was a big year for me. I drove a school bus, got hit by a car, and and had my balls sliced open. Literally. One gray, cloudy day, I was playing with toy cars during noon recess with Kenny, the son of the owner of our little town's only remaining grocery store, when I felt a pain in one of my testicles. Was I having a special, tingly feeling about Kenny? No, it was definitely pain. Sharp, throbbing ball pain. At first, I didn't think much of it. Maybe I'd mildly chung-kinged my seeds while rolling around on the hard ground. The pain soon subsided, and I returned my focus to perfectly timing my "VRRROOOOOOM!" and "SCREEEEEECH!" noises to the movement of the tiny diecast cars.

Throughout that afternoon, the pain in my nutsack rose and ebbed. One minute, I felt fine, and the next minute, I felt like I'd been thwacked in the groin with a length of Hot Wheel track. Each time the pain returned, it was more intense and longer in duration. By the bus dropped us off at home, the pain was intensely sharp, relieved only by brief periods of dull aching. I informed my mom, a registered nurse, of my dilemma. She was concerned enough that she called to make an appointment with our family doctor for the following morning.

Morning wasn't going to come fast enough. By the time 7 pm came around, the pain in my man sack was searing hot and relentless. My testicle had swollen to twice its normal size, and I was in absolute agony. Mom was used to medical emergencies, but when your firstborn son is rolling around on the floor screaming and flopping around a grotesquely swollen elephant man testicle, you're probably going to have a hard time keeping your cool (my brother and dad probably just wished I'd shut the hell up so they could watch Who's the Boss or whatever was on that night. But Mom kept it together and called the hospital. They connected her to our doctor, and he advised putting an ice bag on my nut bag and bringing me into the emegency room ASAP. Done and done!

I don't care how modest of a person you are, when your genitals are in searing pain, swollen, and red, you don't even wait for the doctor to tell you to drop trou. You practically take your pants off in the ER waiting room and slap your business on the counter next to the insurance forms. "Look at this shit! This is not right! FIX IT!!" Fortunately that was not necessary. The doctor assessed the problem in the privacy of an exam room and soon concluded this was beyond what our little hospital was equipped to deal with. I was given some painkillers and was told to continue with the ice treatment. He called to make an appointment with a specialist in Grand Forks, a little more than a 2 hour drive from our farm, for the next day.

I slept fitfully that night. The pain meds helped, but it's hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in when there's a plastic bag full of ice cubes strapped to your balls. By the time we got to the clinic in Grand Forks, the swelling had gone down, and the dose of pain pills I took that morning were wearing off. The doctor, a soft-spoken, kindly gentleman of Asian descent, rolled my tender testicle around in his hands like he was examining a kiwifruit for bruises. I winced and shed a few tears, but I didn't want to look like a bitch in front of this doctor (which is funny considering he was freely manhandling my tackle in its entirety) , so I stifled my sobs and whimpers until he wasn't looking.

I don't recall how the news was delivered to me, whether it was from the doctor himself or my parents after meeting with him privately, but it put my heart into my throat. I had a testicular torsion, also known as a strangulated testicle, which means that my testicle had become rotated inside the scrotum, cutting off proper blood flow. If left untreated, it could mean losing the testicle entirely. I would have to have emergency surgery that very day if I didn't want to be known as Jimmy Half Sack. At the tender age of 8, I had never had any sort of surgery before, so the fear of the unknown and my active imagination evoked images of being poked with needles the size of traffic cones and having my nuts torn open with a dull, rusty hacksaw. I was terrified.

We had a bit of time before I had to check in at the hospital, and my parents tried to reassure me. But short of knocking me out with an ether rag, there's nothing they could of said or done to calm me. Since I was having surgery, I wasn't allowed to eat anything for lunch, but it didn't matter. My stomach bounced around like a Florida-bound inflatable raft from Cuba. If I had eaten anything, I probably would have thrown it up anyway.

We checked in at the hospital, and I was taken to my room where I put on the stereotypical ass-baring hospital gown and crawled into bed. I tried in vain to nap as my parents fidgeted and watched tv. It was in those moments of relative calm that my focus returned to the shooting, burning pain in my testicle. I had been so overcome with fear of the cloudy notion of surgery itself that I had completely forgotten about why I had to have it. Right, the ball thing.

Finally they came to put me on a gurney and wheel me to the operating room. A man's voice said, "Jeremy, you're going to feel a little sting in your arm when we put the needle in." Voices, getting fainter, heavy eyelids, fading, blackness. The next thing I knew, I awoke in a haze and was immediately hit with horrible waves of nausea -- I would later find out this was a reaction to the anesthesia. I felt like bed was adrift in choppy waters off of Nantucket. It was unbearable, but I fell asleep again and next awoke back in my room. The nausea was still there, but had subsided a little. This time, however, I noticed my throat was raw. Since I had eaten breakfast that morning, unaware that I would end up having to have surgery, they had to put a tube down my throat to drain my stomach contents before surgery. All of that pain didn't seem worth a small bowl of Rice Krispies and cup of hot chocolate. I should have gone for the tall stack at IHOP or eaten a sundae topped with a pizza.

The next day, the doctor came in to check on my condition and the incision. You would have thought that the sight of my stitched-up, blood-encrusted, purple, mottled, and swollen testicle would be too much for me handle, but my curiosity as too overpowering not to look. Everything was fine, and I'd be able to go home in a couple more days or so.

Up until that afternoon, I'd had the room to myself. But then they wheeled in another kid who would be my roomie until I was released. I don't remember much about him other than that he was kind of a tubby kid with smelly, lingering farts, and he whined constantly whenever the nurses tried to do their jobs. Putting in an IV needle resulted in drama worthy of General Hospital. "Ow!! Oh!! I think you hit a nerve! I'm paralyzed. PARALYZED!!!" The best part was him rolling around and wildly flailing his arms and legs to put emphasis on the word "paralyzed." Somebody get this kid a medical dictionary and some matches.

Thankfully the stitches they used were the kind that would fall out on their own, and I would not have to go through the added torture of having threads snipped and pulled from my man business later on. I healed nicely, and I'm happy to report that not only are both of my testicles in completely operational order to this day, I have had a third testicle added as good measure (the involuntary donor was a guy who picked the wrong night to fall asleep on a bench in Loring Park). Think of it like an extra bottle of iodine in a first aid kit. Except it's an extra testicle, and the first aid kit is in my pants. Who needs first aid, ladies?