vandweller
The night Joe Tall got ahold of me to offer me the chance to be a SNG instructor at DeucesCracked, I was lying in a hospital bed wearing what amounted to a jockstrap made of gauze.
Let me explain.
The night before, a mutual acquaintance told me that DeucesCracked needed SNG content badly and asked me if it would be ok for him to show Joe Tall some of my sample videos. Sure, I told him, why not? I always felt some loyalty to StoxPoker, where I am pretty active in the forums, and always expected that they would take me on as an instructor at some point, but it couldn't hurt to hear what DC had to say.
It's Tuesday night and I go to sleep.
The next morning (early!) is trash day. I wake up at about 8:30am and realize that fuck I forgot to put the trash out and I'd better get out there unless I want a teeming can of garbage sitting outside and rotting for an extra week.
My bed is warm. The outside was cold. So think about this: basically you are indoors and your junk is nice and loose. Then you go immediately to the outdoors where it's cold and everything gets drawn upward really quickly. In the process, stuff might not go quite where it's supposed to and bang!, something happens called testicular torsion. Fuuuuck!
A good friend of mine told me about 10 years ago that this had happened to him in 8th grade. It really horrified me. Ever since then I've been mindful of it, if not slightly paranoid and phobic. I'd wake up every morning for ten years and take a half-second pause just to quickly assure myself that no Keith your nuts aren't twisted this morning so go about your business. So that morning I was feeling some slight discomfort down there, and had noticed that one was hanging higher than the other. NOOOOOooooooo...!!!!
I tried shifting things around manually (but gently!), but that really wasn't doing anything. I went into the shower to try and loosen everything up so that maybe everything would right itself and settle into its familar configuration. It didn't. I quickly googled "testicular pain" so I could find the proper name of this thing so that I could tell them in the ER and I wanted to find out just how severe an emergency it was. Turns out, pretty severe. I wake my roommate up and make him drive me in my bucking 1989 Toyota shortbed manual transmission pickup (this is as balla as midstakes SNG grinders get) to the ER.
If this thing happens to you, you have a good chance of losing the testicle if you don't get to the hospital immediately. Knowing the name of the condition (if you remember nothing else in life, commit the words "testicular torsion" to memory) helped a great deal, because it's as if the triage nurses know to run to get a doctor immediately when they hear it.
I blew past everyone else in line. I feel a slight moment of ironic guilt because every single person in the waiting room was non-white and looking kinda pissed off (how else would you feel sitting in an ER waiting room while the desk nurse does a crossword puzzle?). So here comes this white guy barrel-assing his way into the ER, whispering some magic word in the white nurse's ear (testicular torsion, for those of you who missed it)and being immediately whisked off into triage. The guilt didn't last long because fuck this fucking thing fucking hurt.
I had left the house at 8:50am and the pain was about a 4 out of 10. When I got out of the car 20 minutes later it was about an 8. When I got into the exam room 2 minutes later it was about a 13. I got into the ER at 9:15am and after some pleasantries and speculation about the Patriots' playoff chances (eff you Farvrevrrve!) with the ultrasound technician, I was on the operating table at 11:00am.
Incidentally, in order to assure that this doesn't happen again, after the surgeon untwists your nut and corrects the torsion, he will suture the testicle to the scrotum, sort of "tacking" it in place. He then does the same thing for the other unaffected testicle just to be sure. I appreciate his thoroughness.
I was lying around in that hospital bed essentially motionless for about 8 hours, having watched Karate Kid 1 and 2, and Grosse Pointe Blank, with one brief time where I stood up to adjust my bandaging, the aforementioned jockstrap made of gauze. Had a lot of soreness, but a constant supply vicodin then and again helped. Still get episodes of soreness even now, two weeks later, and still can't really wear denim pants.
Besides the vicodin, it also helped that my hospital had wifi. If it hadn't I wouldn't have been around for Joe Tall to essentially beg me to sign on with DC. :-P It didn't take long for him to convince me, and I'm pretty glad he did. Despite the real possibility of dying from a gangrenous testicle, I consider that day pretty much +EV.
Anyway, I happy to be here, and the point of all this is to thank you for accepting me into this community. The best gift I can repay you with is the magic words, "testicular torsion". I hope you never need to use them.
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