It Took 20 Years and Three Surgeries to Fix My Balls

Let me tell you about my balls.

They've been through a lot: three surgeries in my 20-something years on this earth. As a result, they're not in particularly good shape. My scrotum resembles that of an octagenarian's. Rugged. Gnarled. Pockmarked. Chicken-skinned. How many more details do you want? How many do I need to provide?

When a woman sees my balls for the first time, she's inevitably underwhelmed. Nothing kills the mood like me dropping trou to reveal my perfectly healthy, perfectly functional, but also weirdly malformed old-man balls. I'm sure the women who have seen them have questions they didn't ask me out of embarrassment; I'm sure I've been a topic of conversation at a few post-hookup brunch-with-the-girls get-togethers. But I don't really mind the state of my balls.

It used to be so much worse.

I was born with crypotrchidism, a monstrous word that simply means my testicles hadn't descended into my scrotum. Most of the time, the kid's balls drop within a year, so no big deal, but in my case they stayed stubbornly inside my abdomen. When I was a year old, a doctor who thought only one of my testicles hadn't descended tried to remedy this by reaching into my body with a metal rod and draw the tardy gonad out. This is a procedure called an orchiopexy, and the only evidence of this surgery is a small, coinslot-shaped scar etched into my lower right abdominal wall and a little dog-ear flap of skin on the right side of my ball bag.

That left me with only a single ball, a fact I didn't notice for years, even though I was a competitive swimmer and our required practice attire was a Speedo—nothing to shield a kid who might have some abnormalities beneath the nylon. Until I was 12, I had no concept of how I stacked up size-wise. That changed one day when I happened to glance at one of the more developed swimmers in my practice group. The kid was blessed, but what struck me was not the size of the shaft, it was the beefiness of his nads. To add insult to injury, he was also a better swimmer than me. Suddenly I was acutely aware of my own testicular inadequacies as well as my aquatic inadequacies. Why didn't my nuts look like his?

Around this time, I started waking up in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in my left abdomen, like extreme gas coupled with the nausea of getting kicked in the groin. My mom took me to a urologist. I lay down and the doctor took all of five seconds to roll his fingers over my stomach. "Yep," he nodded. "I feel a testicle."

Given my medical history, the doctor theorized that neither of my testicles, not just my right one, had descended on their own, a condition significantly less common than ordinary one-ball cryptorchidism.

By then, I had begun to hit puberty, and that meant my undescended ball was growing. This made getting it down into my sack a lot more complex then just cuesticking it down into its proper place as had been done with ball number one. During this second orchiopexy, the doctor affixed my second, left nut to the inside of my sack so it wouldn't yo-yo back up into my stomach, and a neat concave seam formed.

That should have been the end of it. My nuts should have never seen a scalpel again.

But they continued to grow. My right one started to get heavier and move downward. My left, surgically sewn to my scrotum, grew… outward. Now whenever I threw my Speedo on, my left ball provided a throne for my dick to sit atop, creating the illusion I was packing serious heat. That was great on the pool deck, but without the Speedo my ball and dick would protrude out so far in athletic shorts it looked like I had a perpetual semi.

Worse, as I got a little older I could not fully experience the pleasures of woman-on-top intercourse. While my right testicle hung down and out of harm's way, my tethered left ball protruded an inch up the underside of my shaft, effectively placing it in a vise when my girlfriend's body descended upon mine during sex. Not even reverse cowgirl could protect it from continuous, rhythmic abuse.

"It feels really good," I'd say to my frustrated girlfriend, on the verge of vomiting. "It's just that… well, you're crushing my nut."

Right around my 20th birthday I sat in the doctor's office and led him through my extensive testicular history. I explained to him that the way my left testicle was affixed to my scrotum caused some discomfort during physical activity. His response was that I was "almost a full-grown adult now" and I wouldn't be "partaking in too many serious physical activities henceforth."

I got a little bit more specific and told him my nut was getting slammed in the human jackhammer of my girlfriend's bouncing torso as she pogo'd atop me.

He frowned. "Now that would be a cause for concern." He agreed to perform a third surgery to move my ball out of harm's way.

It was a success, but all those operations have left my scrotum permanently damaged. Skin has a certain amount of elasticity. One testicular surgery left hardly a blemish. Two and the effects were apparent but not wholly egregious. After the third, it appeared I had a boxer's worn-out speed bag between my legs. I was bedridden for a few days and sent a pixelated shot of my grapefruit-sized sack to some college buddies, who promptly spread it around campus. My testicular reputation preceded me for months after, and new people I met were eager to put a face to my nuts. Yes, I still have the picture. No, I will not show it to you.

It's been years since my last procedure so I have to assume my scrotum has reached its final form. The right ball hangs deep and low; the left, low in its own right, is still affixed to my sack to prevent torsion, though it's been repositioned to reduce illusory erections and to allow me to comfortably perform a whole range of physical activities.

These days, it isn't that bad. As I get older, women seem to be getting weirder, or perhaps my freakshow balls cause me to subconsciously be more attracted to eccentric partners. Last month a woman was giving me an informal, post-coitus physical and asked me about the scars and general disarray. I told her about my balls' path to their current state. "I think they're sexy," she said. "I think you have great balls."

At last.

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