greggoconnell.com blog

I've never told this story to such a wide audience. Most people don't know this happened to me but I feel compelled to tell everyone about it, and maybe just maybe I can help some young 12-18 year old stud to cope with this extremely painful experience.

It was May of 1993 (the link goes to things that happened in 1993 - good stuff!!!)
I was a ripe 13 years old and in the 7th grade. I wish I had some photos of me when I was 13 years old. I was extremely hot trust me with that. Imagine a young Gregg just entering puberty with a lean semi-hairless body! I was in a couple of basketball leagues and played sports on the side with my friends so I stayed very active. The day arrived and it was a warm spring evening. My brother, his friend Doug & I decided to go play some hoops (basketball - duh!) at Stonehill College.
We got to the courts and the basketball rims were really low. They weren't the typical 10 feet high - these were more like 9 feet high. Well we played basketball for a couple of hours. We played "Horse" "21" & "Around the World" When we were finished playing we all tried to grab the rim and dunk the ball. Well my brother and Doug had no problem doing it. My brother is 6'2, Doug is 5'11 & in 1993 I was 5'7. I could only grab the net not the rim. I tried grabbing the rim a good handful of times. Well on the ride home I started to get these stomach aches which weren't uncommon for me during this time. I would often get really bad stomach aches and then they would eventually go away. So as you can see I was thinking it was just another bad stomach ache. We got home and the "stomach ache" persisted for about 2 hours. I said to my mom my stomach ache won't go away and it really hurts, I think I need to go to the emergency room. So she called the emergency room to get info on if they could take me immediately and so I went outside and I began throwing up uncontrollably. My sister came out and tried to comfort me but I kept getting sick so she went in and told my mom. My mom, sister & I then all headed to the emergency room at Brockton Hospital.

We arrived at the hospital and they took us in immediately. They asked me where the pain was and I told them my stomach so they started to push on my abdomen, my testicles and stomach. They finally found where it hurt most when they pushed on my testicle and they determined it was either a twisted testicle or a tumor in my testicle but they needed to do x-rays to be sure. Now as I waited for them to get the x-ray room ready the pain was getting worse and worse. I've never been in such bad pain in my life. I was rolled up in a ball, squeezing my mom and sisters hands, yelling for them to get me some pain killers but no one could get me anything cause I needed to go into surgery.

They took the x-ray's and determined it was a twisted testicle and it needed to be operated on immediately! I was taken into emergency surgery and they untwisted my testicle. I later found out it was twisted 6 times inside and it was the worse case they had ever seen! If I hadn't gotten the surgery I would have lost my testicle because what basically happens is the testicle isn't getting any oxygen so it just dies. I was also the proud parent of 6 stitches in my testicle - ouch!
I went to a Urologist once a week for him to check it all out and on the last visit he pulled the stitches out - Ouch!

I hope you enjoyed my story. It's a story of the ages that the whole family can enjoy!

Gregg