Lacrosse player who didn’t wear a jockstrap fractures BOTH of his testicles after being hit in the scrotum by a ball on a ‘high-speed pass’
- The 17-year-old returned to the pitch to finish the game despite ‘significant pain’
- At home that evening the pain in his genitals got worse and he went to hospital
- Doctors did scans and found both his testicles were ‘fractured’
- They operated to repair the outer layers of the organs inside the scrotum
A teenage lacrosse player fractured both his testicles and needed surgery after the ball hit him in the groin.
The 17-year-old was sent to the emergency room in the evening after being struck in the gonads during a match in which he wasn’t wearing a jockstrap.
Doctors recounting his injury in a case report revealed he ‘immediately developed significant scrotal pain’ after the ball hit him.
But then he threw caution to the wind and returned to the match after a ‘brief rest’, carrying on as normal and then going home afterwards.
Later that day, however, the pain got worse and he was sent to the emergency department at a hospital in Massachusetts. Doctors decided to operate the next day.
A 17-year-old boy in Massachusetts had to have surgery to repair his testicles after both of them were burst open when he was hit in the groin with a lacrosse ball (stock image of a lacrosse player)
In hospital, scans revealed the boy had ‘fractured’ both of his testicles, according to doctors from the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington.
A testicle fracture is an injury in which the outer layer of the sex organ is broken and the flesh contained inside begins to come out.
Lacrosse balls like the one the boy was hit by are about the size of a tennis ball but made of solid rubber and travel at speeds of up to 90mph (145kph).
They weigh around five ounces (145g), which is almost as much as a billiard ball.
Bizarrely, by the time the boy was admitted to hospital and had been given ibruprofen, his genitals had stopped hurting him.
And he told doctors he didn’t want to have surgery if they could help it, so the medics chose to keep him in overnight and carry out more tests in the morning.
But those scans revealed both the testicles were seriously injured and had developed haematomas – solid swellings of clotted blood.
The team operated to repair the testicles – which were still inside the scrotum – by patching the outer layer back together to keep the contents inside.
Dr Matthew Moynihan and Dr Marc Manganiello, writing in the medical journal Urology Case Reports, said injuries like this could have long-term consequences.
Among them were having to remove the testicles completely if blood supply was cut off for long enough for the flesh to start to die off.
They did not reveal what happened to the boy in the case report, but implied his surgery had been a success.