As I was lying on the cold operating table, everything around me slowed and time seemed to have come to a standstill.

There is nothing worse than waking up on a Monday morning after a nice pleasurable weekend and realizing that there was nothing but lunch and gym to look forward to. While I do my morning pondering of whether I should make the effort to get up after hitting the snooze button five times, I notice a slight pinch on the lower section of my groin, my testicles. I look down as if dazed; that has never happened before. Only to realize after that the pinch was a hint of many hours of pain to come. After that jolt of pain, I continue through my daily morning routine of showering, getting ready and eating breakfast. I wait at my bus stop and notice the musty smell of the air as the heat escapes the ground from the hot June sun
My day continues on normally, but I still think about the jolt of pain I had that early morning. Lunch comes and I wait impatiently in line to get my tray of not-so-bad school lunch (at least it was Monday and the food was normal) ,I ate and thought about the pinch. Finishing school and decide that I need to explain to my mother what happened that morning. When I got home and I started explaining the situation to my mother, all the signs of worriment came to her face. She suddenly stopped whatever she was doing as I started telling my story of the morning. With her eyes are wide open, eyebrows perked, and head slightly lunged towards me, she said “We need to get to your doctor as soon as possible”, in Spanish of course. That same day we scheduled an appointment and went to the doctor to check my testicles. After sitting in the calm room, only to hear the rustle of papers and children playing with the bacteria infected toys.

After a series of medical procedures the pediatrician told me it could be Epididymitis which is the infection of the part of the testicle that produces sperm, so she proceeded to give me antibiotics and come back if the pain comes back.
The next morning, I awoke to my regular routine and this time I realized a numbing kind of pain in my testicle. I didn’t overlook it and I started becoming worried but I went to school anyways, the thought in the back of my head. Approaching my fourth period class, and as I sit down, an excruciating pain hit my testicles in a sudden split second. As I try to mumble the words “Can I go to the nurse” to my teacher, he tells me to go. Sprinting down the hallway, I open the door to the nurse’s office and I tell her about my agonizing pain and she lays me down quickly, breaks an ice pack and tells me that I may have testicular torsion which requires hospitalization. The words circled around my head as I tried to keep my composition while I squirmed around in pain.
The nurse dials my mother but apparently she is at work and is too far to come for an emergency as her job requires her to work far. My uncle, I will never forget, was the third person that got called, and he immediately left his job and rushed to my school to pick me up to take me to ER. When my uncle came to Forest Grove Middle to pick me up I rushed into his car, purple and blue of pain, and sat while I gave him directions to the hospital.

After driving around for what seemed to me like hours, I had taken him to a remote part near Elm Park community school because from what I remember that’s where my pediatrician was and that’s where I needed to go, when in fact I needed to go to the ER room, straight away . All this time, I’m in excruciating pain and there is nothing to be done but one fairly warm icepack on my testicles and time feeling like eternities. Finally we arrive to the ER room, but again make the mistake of making an ER appointment, when it was supposed to be a straight visit to the operating table. As I waited in the room stupidly for a visit, a nurse got a call from my pediatrician that I needed emergency surgery and I shouldn’t be waiting.

I got rushed straight into a room, screaming in pain and worsening by the second, eyes bloodshot red, head pounding, and crazy ideas about what I would rather have happen than this. The doctor stepped in and just by sight determined I needed surgery because I had testicular torsion. He explained how it was the vein going to the testicle that gets wrapped up and cuts the blood circulation to the testicle. Gruesome thoughts came to my head about how I could lose them and how I would function if I only had one testicle. All this time, I have been with my uncle, who was very calm looking and listening on the side, but not aware of most of the talking, as he spoke and understood little English. Moments later, my mother came rushing and asked questions. The doctors explained everything; they put me on a table, gave me words of comfort and told me it was going to be alright.

The moments of the cart moving to the operating table were some of the slowest moments I’ve ever had in my life, my body had gone into shock and I no longer felt pain, only amazement. Doctors and what seemed like assistants circled around me and mumbled words. They proceeded to tell me “Count backwards from 10”…

Beyond that day, I used that experience to measure any sort of pain I’ve ever had and compared it. It taught me many lessons about how important family members are to your health and safety, something truly priceless. “Pain lets you know you’re still alive” is a very true quote, as I felt alive as ever when this took place, a true human feeling.