The whole story is that DeBrusk got hit in one of his testicles with a slap shot so hard that it inflamed to the size of a tennis ball and he fainted at the hospital before surgery could even be performed.
“It was the scariest thing, looking down and it’s just like, ‘Oh my god. What’s going to happen?’” DeBrusk said in a conversation with WEEI.com. “You’re 18 years old and you’re thinking to yourself whether you’re ever going to have kids, things like that. I freaked out.”
DeBrusk suffered the injury blocking a shot on his first shift of a Broncos game on Nov. 3. He was wearing a cup, but because he wears some of his pads loosely, the shot missed the cup altogether and hit his left testicle. His teammates chuckled as any teenager would, as their buddy had gotten hit in the you-know-whats, except DeBrusk had no idea what was going on and was experiencing perhaps the most frightening moments of his life.
“The only thing I’ll remember about it is just the pain,” he said. “That’s the worst part about the injury, is how much it hurt, because I tried to get up. I went down and I didn’t know what happened, because you don’t feel it in that area. It goes up to your mid-section, so I thought my appendix burst or something, because I couldn’t move. It was an unbelievable feeling. I’ll never forget it. I tried to get up and I had to crawl to the bench. I had to crawl and they were like, ‘Get up, get up.’ I was like, ‘I can’t get up.’”
