The Splinter

In the course of my life I've had some grisly injuries. I've had part of a finger mauled by a jigsaw. I've had a blowgun dart shot through my hand. I've severed an ACL and watched as 3-4 feet of surgical tubing was pulled from around and through my knee joint. I've had shrapnel dug out of my skin from a homemade explosive. But that all pales in comparison to what you're about to read. Consider that your warning.

I got a splinter. In my ballsack.
Take a while to let that sink in.
Guys, this story is going to make you cringe.

My senior year of high school I was an avid distance runner. The cross country season was in full blast and we were putting in anywhere from 6-14 miles every day. The runs can be monotonous, and being the industrious little shitheads we were, we'd come up with games to play on the run to keep our mind off how bad running that far sucked. One game we played was called "rocket-stick" where one guy would grab a fallen limb out in the forest on a run, swinging it at a nearby stick. When the stick made contact, pieces would break off and shoot out like little wooden rockets. I know guys to this day who still have scars from rocket-stick.

But the main game we played on these runs was called tree-tipping. The basic idea is to shimmy up a young tree as high as you could, then swing out and bend it all the way to the ground (picture a reverse pole vault.) The goal is to tip the biggest tree, all you win is bragging rights. The game had been around a while at that time, and there was one tree out in the woods called the "Untippable." Many young men had tried to tip it, and many had failed. I was determined to conquer this tree though, and when we approached the tree I proclaimed my intentions to my teammates.

"Today is the day, gentleman, that I tip the untippable."

"Sam, there is no way you can tip that tree. And we don't feel like taking you to the hospital today. Quit being gay."

"Hey, fuck you. I'm going to do it."

"I'm going to do your mom."

"...Die in a fire, asshole."

I started shimmying up the tree, quickly. All I was wearing at the time were my tiny little running shorts and running shoes, so I probably resembled Gollum a bit as I clambered on. Twenty-five feet... Thirty feet... Forty feet up the tree. The higher I got, the more my teammates cheered. Finally, I got to a height where I felt the tree would tip to the ground under my weight. I swung out and slowly the tree started bending towards the earth. My teammates were going wild, they thought such a feat was impossible. The closer it bent towards the ground, the more feverish their cheers became.

And then the tree stopped, caught in mid-air by the branches of another tree. Terror shook at my very foundation. The woods became silent as we all realized how high I still was in the air. As I contemplated ways to get back to that sweet, sweet ground... I could hear my teammates discussing how to dispose of my lifeless body after I fell from that height. I fiercely swung my legs up, finally hooking them back around the now horizontal tree trunk. Inch by inch I started shimmying my way back down the trunk. It looked like I might escape this disaster after all.

Physics lesson: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you climb a tree and try to tip it, you have to achieve a certain height before your weight can take it all the way to the ground. Climbing back down that bent tree, when you reach that point where your weight stops being enough to bend the tree guess what happens. The tree sprung back to upright like a pole vault pole unbending. My teammates screamed out in horror. I went from being 20 feet off the ground to being back up to around 35 in a timeframe of about half a second. The force of the tree unbending caused my grip to falter. As I slipped, I wrapped my arms and legs around the tree in a desperate attempt to keep myself from falling. I then proceeded to slide down a tree trunk like a firepole from 30+ feet.

I hit the ground with a thud and rolled off to the side. My teammates rushed in to help me up, but I brushed them off; I knew something went terribly wrong. As they formed a circle around me I yanked my shorts down faster than an alter boy in the priest chamber. There was a moment of confusion as they tried to figure out why I had stripped myself naked in the middle of a group of guys. Then we all seemed to see it at the same time.

Protruding from the right side of my scrotum was a 2-inch splinter. A little bit of blood trickled down the side of my leg.

The entire group screamed in unison and turned away from the horrid sight. Jeremy gagged. Matt dry heaved off in a bush. I screamed in terror. The pain was exactly how you think it would be guys; that dull, sickening, stomach-turning pain that you would associate with a bad kick to the balls. I dropped to my knees, afraid to touch it. "What do I do?" I desperately asked my friends, but no one could even stand to look at it. The splinter had pierced the skin, but hadn't actually impaled a testicle. I tugged at it but it seemed to be attached by a barb and wouldn't budge. I pulled harder and was met by more gagging from onlookers. The splinter would not budge. The only option now was to break the excess off and try to get myself somewhere I could perform minor surgery.

I'm kind of proud of this next part. After breaking the splinter off and putting my shorts back on, I ran the three miles back to my high school unaided. Each step felt like someone was flicking me on the right side of my ballsack. If Prefontaine can set an american record in the 5k with 10 busted stitches in his foot, I'll be damned if I'm going to let a scrotal splinter stop me.

When I finally made it back to the high school, I had to find a pair of tweezers. I feared the rest of the splinter would just dig in further and further. Luckily, Jeremy's mom was there. Jeremy's mom was kind of a cross country groupie, she was at every practice and every meet and always had food and drinks for the runners. It almost made up for the fact that she was annoying and fat, because that was pretty cool. We talked her into driving to the dollar general to buy us a pair of tweezers. When she returned, she tried insisting on helping me get the splinter out. Lucky for Jeremy, he talked her out of fondling my testicles.

I performed the minor surgery with my teammates watching intently and barely holding back their lunches. Cheers finally erupted as I pulled the remainder of the splinter from my bruised and bloody scrotum. I'm happy to say that everything today is in fine working order. There is still a small scar to always remind me of that horrific day.

That was hard to share, I think I need a hug.