Poor Josh has Testicular Torsion on his Birthday!

So as I previously mentioned, Joshua unfortunately spent the end of his birthday with an urgent visit to Basildon A&E suffering with a lot of pain down below with symptoms pointing to a twisted testicle or testicular torsion as it is know. With me having had a history of a very similar condition the hospital did not mess about and within about 2 hours of taking him to hospital, he was going under general anaesthetic and heading down for a 45 min surgery to fix the problem.

Tina did the night shift and stayed with him at the hospital whilst I stayed at home to look after Brandon and Holly. This gave Tina the awful job of watching one of your children being put to sleep and then wheeled off to the theatre. I remember going through this when Brandon had his operation on his eye and it brought me to tears when the anaesthetic kicks in and they go completely limp.

Despite it being his birthday we made absolutely the right decision as you only have a matter of hours with this condition and if not operated on then the testicle can often not be saved and needs to be completely removed. What surprised me is that I thought this condition was something you caused by cycling, exercise, break dancing!!!!, etc, however it turns out that it is also hereditary and is common in guys with something called bell clapper deformity which is where the testicles are not attached to the scrotum and can twist around. This twisting can occur just whilst sleeping and doesn't necessarily need to be caused by strenuous exercise. The corrective surgery which Joshua has had to fix the problem is to untwist the testicle chord and then stitch the testicle to the scrotum to prevent it from happening again.

So the good news is that Joshua cannot experience this problem again on one side, the bad news is he could one day get it on the other side. The even worse news is that as it is hereditary then there is a good chance Brandon may well suffer with testicular torsion and we have been advised to keep an eye on him as well.

So with the surgery over Joshua was finally let out of hospital just after lunchtime yesterday. He was suffering with a lot of sickness as an after effect to the anaesthetic and was not eating much at all. He was also extremely drowsy due to the Calopol and Nurofen he was dosed up on. He has now been advised to take 2 weeks off of school (luckily one week of this will be half term so he won't miss out on too much school, but worse than that he has been told no sport for 4 weeks!!!! This will kill him and means he can't ride his new bike for a while. Such a shame as he has been making real progress with his football lately and 4 weeks is a bit of a setback.

The hospital staff looked after Joshua amazingly and even got him a birthday card and present. The present is an absolutely amazing book all about robots.

Joshua recovering at home after his birthday surgery. Sleeping off the drugs with his sick bowls to hand.

Joshua's little teddy that Tina bought him at the hospital for being such a brave boy.