Welcome to Blood Week. We put out the call last week for your tales of of blood, violence, gruesome injuries, near-death experiences, mayhem, and blood. Many of you came through with submissions, which we'll be posting throughout the week. If you have a story and/or photos to share, email [email protected], with Blood Week in the subject line.
J.D., a physician at a small college, had the kind of story not even he would hear every day. Take it away, J.D.:
One day I was there seeing patients when a group of students came in, grabbed the athletic trainer, and told him he had to come out to the gym, fast.
I continued seeing patients for a another minute until the athletic trainer came running in and said, "Doc, you gotta see this."
So I follow him out to the gym where I find a male student-athlete curled up in the fetal position on the indoor track. I knelt down and asked him what's up.
"There's blood coming out of my dick."
I'm taken aback by this and asked him to repeat what he just said.
"Doc, I landed on top of a hurdle while jumping, felt a pop, and now there's blood coming out of my dick."
We picked him up, and I asked him to go to the bathroom and look around 'down there.' He came out, said he tried to piss and couldn't, but that blood is flowing from his pee hole.
Long story short, we shipped him to the ER, found out he crushed his urethra (the x-rays are actually pretty awful to look at), and he had to have a catheter in for 6 months. To make matters worse, he wasn't even a hurdler, he was just fucking around at practice and wanted to give it a try.
We got a few stories about injuries (wince) in that area. Justin has a particularly painful one involving a friend and taking a charge in basketball. You know where this is headed:
Luckily, this didn't happen to me...
While in high school I played for the varsity basketball team. During one of our games I wasn't playing very good defense and the person I was guarding slipped right by me. Luckily, one of our guards stepped in and took a charge. It looked like he got run over by a train! He was slow to get up and looked like he was in some serious pain, but he ended up playing the rest of the game like nothing happened. After the game, we went down to the locker room to change and his locker was right next to mine. I hear him utter, "Oooh, shit!" I look over at him... He is looking down his shorts at his junk. Doesn't say anything else, grabs his stuff and heads out. That just left me to wonder what the hell was going on.
I didn't hear anything more, so the next day myself and another teammate went over to see him. He is just chillin' on the couch with his girlfriend. I ask him if everything was alright. He pulls down his shorts and pulls out the biggest blackest pair of testicles imaginable. (I literally can not explain how much that grape fruit sized sack haunted me for the years following.) By the way... he is a 5'9" white dude. When he took the charge the knee somehow severed a blood vessel that leads to his balls. Due to the severed blood vessel the blood filled up in his sack. He would need to have the blood drained by a Doctor.
The lesson to be learned here is... make sure to cover up if you are going to take a charge or just get the fuck out the way!
Eddie confronted a rather awful scenario involving a young boy playing soccer. Poor, poor little guy:
I was coaching a recreational boys soccer team (7-8 years old) a few years back and constantly saw kids go down with injuries, cry for a short time, then realize they got enough attention and run back into the practice or game. One game, a kid on my team was dribbling in the goal box and got absolutely clobbered by goalie. The goalie had not learned how to slide tackle properly and decided jump into my kid with both cleats up. My kid was pretty shaken up, but seemed to be ok once we got him to the sideline. He even went back into the game for a few minutes before halftime. At halftime, my kid comes up to me and says he has a really bad pain in his stomach and needs to go to the bathroom. I help him to the bathroom, tell him go pee in the urinal and wait outside for him to come out. After about 30 seconds I hear him shrieking in the bathroom. I immediately run in to what looked the scene of a murder. There was blood all over the floor and my kid was crying and screaming...and still pissing blood on the floor. I have a pretty sensitive sense of smell and immediately started gagging. I quickly grabbed him and carried him back to our sideline to where I told a parent to call an ambulance. Ambulance gets there and this kid has blood all over his shorts and socks, but he seems ok (I thought it was life or death for this kid). Ambulance guy said he just took a really hard shot to his kidney and that he was just filtering it out of his system. Never went back to that bathroom.
Finally, there's Alex, who once took his hazing duties as a captain of his high school's pole-vaulting team a bit too seriously:
Well, one time I did wake up in the ‘box' with an EMT looking at me, but overall pole vaulting is quite safe. Being on a high school pole vaulting team on the other hand, is not. Launching yourself in the air builds up the adrenaline, but it doesn't seem to dissipate with such a cushy landing. As practice went on, I could usually feel our collective energy escalate to Mike Meyer's Hyper-hypo status. As captain I felt the responsibility to harness this energy into crazy stunts. When we concussed the freshman by rolling him up in the wrestling mats and throwing him off the bleachers, my coach screamed most of the Johnny Knoxville out of me, but for the rest of the team it seemed to fuel the fire. We were the best team the school had ever had, so they felt untouchable.
That's why, on a distance run a week later, everyone launched into a giddy sprint when I announced we'll do standard race back to the mats, but we have to climb over the 8 ft. fence to get there. Never race climbing a fence, please. You could puncture your sack at the top. Two of us were the last to hit the fence. I made it over first, and then heard a weird combination of grunt and gurgle. By the time I landed and looked back there was a steady stream of blood flowing down my friend's leg. SO. MUCH. BLOOD. I should stop here to explain there are two types of good high school pole vaulters: tall skinny guys like the 4 of us frozen there with mouths agape, and the stocky type on the fence with huge arms and legendary abs. As my eyes followed from the drip drip off the toe of his shoe to his soaked red sock finally up to his face, my meathead friend was looking straight at me. He didn't say anything, he didn't grimace or blink, he was going to lock on me until I did something. So, I finally barked an order. One of the guys got down on his hands and knees and I stood on him and lifted the blood soaked leg while the other guy caught him. I don't think I even did much lifting, but it must have been just enough to ensure that when the poor guy got down, we wouldn't see his sack still dangling at the top of the fence.
Once he was on the ground, it must have been the first time he really noticed all the blood. I saw him look at his red sock as his face went from embarrassed red to terrified white. He screamed us a Braveheart-level F-word and started blubbering. Oddly, I became relieved right then, the nightmare was over. We made him a shoddy diaper with my warm-up pants before our coach came to scream at us. The next day he hired an assistant coach to supervise us because I could no longer be trusted. Surprisingly, meathead was back in practice the next week with some brand new compression shorts.