Careful picking up your balls, chaps: Boy, 16, loses his TESTICLE after bending down to grab one

A teenager sent one of his testicles slinging inside his body while bending over to pick up a golf ball. 

The 16-year-old, from Utah, developed a sudden pain in his groin after ‘leaning over to retrieve a golf ball’ on the green.

After a quick inspection, he was noticed his left testicle had vanished and promptly sought medical help. 

Medics eventually discovered the unidentified boy’s testicle had retracted far higher than normal and became lodged.

They said this was due to an unusual aspect of the boy’s biology that he had carried from birth.

Surgeons in Salt Lake City, who shared the eye-watering tale in the journal Urology Case Reports, revealed  he was given painkillers while they explored where exactly where his testicle went.

During questioning, the boy denied suffering any traumatic injury to his groin.

However, he informed medics about the sudden pain he experienced upon picking up the golf ball. 

Doctors performed a CT scan in his lower abdomen and found his left testicle intact, but definitely not where it was supposed to be — hidden higher up in a canal running from his scrotum. 

Checking the boy’s medical history, they saw he was diagnosed with a retractile left testis aged 11.

Retractile describes testes that don’t permanently descend into the scrotum as they normally do after puberty. 

Instead they are more mobile able to move up higher into the body then normal. 

Medics performed keyhole surgery on the area to see if they could return the testis back to its location.

They then confirmed that the boy had a condition called patent processus vaginalis, which he had developed in the womb.

As a boy develops in the womb, the testes begin to grow inside the abdomen before descending into their natural lower position.

Normally the area where the originally testes developed closes.

But occasionally it doesn’t, and an internal connection between this area and the scrotum is formed, a formation called a patent processus vaginalis.

In the boy’s case, his patent processus vaginalis only formed on his left side, with the right closing normally.

This provided the internal pocket for his left testicle to pop into, in theory, as he leant over to pick up the golf ball. 

Surgeons then used tiny surgical tools to give the testicle a ‘firm push’ to pop it out and back into the scrotum.

They noted the testicle seemed undamaged.

Medics team later ‘surgically anchored’ his testicle to the scrotum using a suture.

Seven months post surgery, the boy reported both his testicles had remained inside his scrotum and he had suffered no complications from the op. 

While in theory the case is a result of the boy having  a retractile testicle and a patent processus vaginalis, doctors don’t know how his injury occurred from simply leaning over to pick a golf ball was ‘unclear’. 

The case report did not detail exactly when the case took place.