6
“Wait a moment. It’ll be a hassle if the lines get tangled. Hang it on the IV pole like this, and hold it here while pushing gently as you go. You can go to the bathroom alone, right? Or should I give you a bedpan?”
With perfectly functional limbs, there’s no way I could lie in bed and urinate. Despite having no social status or dignity to speak of, I still had some final shred of self-respect I wanted to maintain.
I gently pushed the IV pole as I entered the bathroom in the hospital room. Finding the presence of the nurse who followed me to the bathroom door burdensome, I closed the door and locked it firmly.
It’s been about an hour since I woke up. I haven’t done anything but I’m tired. If I can’t eat and have nothing to do, is there any point in being awake? I might as well finish my business and go back to sleep.
With that thought, I pulled down the pants of my hospital gown. I carefully held my slightly swollen cock, aimed it at the toilet, and began to urinate. The stream was strong, probably because I’d been holding it for quite a while. Like my deteriorating health despite having a set date to die, my urine had been coming out in trickles, but today I managed to relieve myself cleanly for once.
I felt oddly refreshed. Though my bones ached, I didn’t have the chest pain that made me feel like I was dying. Were they giving me painkillers along with the IV, or was the IV fluid itself beneficial?
As I shook off the remaining drops and went to pull up my underwear, I felt something was strangely missing. I couldn’t feel the fleshy parts that should have been wrapped around my fingers. The stick was there, but the pouch was gone.
What is this feeling of having lost something precious?
I felt around my groin with my hand and then bent down to verify with my own eyes. Though the size seemed somewhat reduced, at least my cock was intact, but the two balls that should be beneath it… were gone. I lifted my cock upward and thoroughly searched underneath, but there was nothing to be found.
Is this… even possible? Is it true that the balls that should be attached here are gone?
I stood frozen like ice, unable to easily recover from the shock. Why on earth couldn’t I see them? Were they the kind of thing that appears and disappears, disappears and reappears?
Had I lost my precious pair of balls in the accident? Perhaps no bones or organs were damaged and I wasn’t seriously injured, but unfortunately my testicles had ruptured, necessitating surgery? But if there had been surgery, the area was smoothly without any trace, as if they had never existed in the first place.
I needed to organize my thoughts. I needed to check if this was possibly a dream and calm my thinking, which was paralyzed by excitement.
I took a deep breath, exhaled, and repeated this a couple of times. Then, clutching the waistband of my pants, I dashed out of the bathroom and headed toward the nursing station.
“Oh my, young man! The IV needle will come out! You need to take that with you!”
The startled voice of the nurse couldn’t stop me. The IV pole I had been dragging along tumbled to the floor, and as the needle pulled out of the back of my hand, droplets of blood scattered.
“What have you done to me?!”
I slammed my hand on the desk as I asked, leaving a red handprint where my bleeding hand had touched.
“What? What are you doing? Just stay where you are for a moment. I’ll treat that for you.”
“What have you done to me? Huh? Did you perform some surgery without my knowledge?”
“Just calm down first, and give me your hand.”
The nurse pressed an alcohol swab against the needle hole on the back of my hand, securing it with tape, then roughly wiped my blood-stained hand while clicking her tongue.
“You need to be careful. You could tear your skin if you’re not careful.”
“The skin isn’t the issue… What exactly… did you do to me?”
“Why are you acting like this? Try to speak calmly. Take a deep breath, and slowly.”
I had already tried deep breathing on my own and realized it had no effect whatsoever. I chewed on my lips, trying to think of a way to clearly convey my bewildering and distressing situation while being as euphemistic as possible.
Aren’t there any male nurses here? I couldn’t bring myself to tell a female nurse that my balls had disappeared, that—unless my eyes were deceiving me—the balls that should be attached to my lower body were absent.
My fingernails tapped incessantly on the desk, reflecting my anxiety. The nurse watching me was visibly accumulating annoyance and irritation, and just as I—having accepted there was no roundabout way to express this—opened my lips to utter the first syllable of “balls”…
“What’s all this commotion?”
A man in a coat approached and asked. Thinking he might be a doctor, I looked at the nurse, but she also seemed to be seeing him for the first time and wore a puzzled expression.
“Stop making a scene and return to your room. Please replace the IV with a new one. Can you do that?”
“What? …Oh, you must be the guardian. If you and the patient go to the room first, I’ll bring the IV fluid right away.”
The man nodded slightly and turned toward me. Exceptionally tall, a slender body, a coat that gleamed as if announcing its expensive price, sunglasses covering half his face. Though his attire wasn’t particularly flashy, strangely the word “modest” would never be used to describe his appearance.
“The room. Lead the way.”
The man spoke in a commanding tone as he lowered his sunglasses. I belatedly realized that his face was the reason he looked splendid even without elaborate decorations.
So this man is that guy’s guardian. The person he brought along must be a driver or an attendant.
Is this man his father? Or his brother? Either way, he didn’t seem like someone who cared about being polite to strangers. Nor did he look like someone who would express heartfelt gratitude while readily handing over an envelope of money. It was going to be difficult from the start.
No, there was a bigger problem right now than money envelopes. That missing thing of mine. That important thing I couldn’t easily mention to others.
I anxiously bit my lips and looked for the nurse, while the man gripped my shoulder and pushed me toward the hospital room. The strength of the hand holding my shoulder was unexpectedly strong, and I was led into the room by the man.
“You’re acting quite frivolous.”
His tone was repulsive. Though I’d heard just one sentence, I could instinctively tell that this man and I would not get along at all. No, I wonder if anyone could maintain a good relationship with a man who speaks like that.
I understood why that guy was always so depressed, unable to speak his mind properly and constantly intimidated. If someone spoke to you in that tone, it would be impossible not to feel self-loathing.
If he speaks this offputtingly to a stranger, it must be even worse in family settings.
“Um, I apologize. But I have my own reasons, and it’s disconcerting when you speak to me like that out of nowhere. I have something important to ask the nurse right now.”
“What’s so important that you need to ask?”
As if saying “let’s hear it,” the man naturally handed his coat to the caregiver and sat on the sofa. He crossed his legs, leaned back, and assumed a perfect posture that represented the pinnacle of unpleasantness, leaving me momentarily unsure how to deal with him.
“I… is there any way I can find out if I’ve had any surgeries or procedures done since coming to this hospital? Of course, if my life was in danger, emergency surgery would have been necessary, but it seems like the hospital performed some strange surgery on me that had nothing to do with saving my life.”
The man let out a slight scoff at my whispered, rapid words. His mouth corner lifted, revealing a deep dimple that reminded me of that guy. I had thought they didn’t look alike, but if I stripped away this man’s splendor, I might find that guy’s pale coloration.
Definitely related by blood.
A man who looked too young to be a father, too old to be a brother, perhaps just right to be an uncle. A man who registered as a guardian and came looking for me, waiting for me to regain consciousness. If I knew who this man was, negotiating a reward would be easier.
The complication was that my testicles were currently more urgent to me than any reward money.
“So… I… what I want to say is…”
After pacing back and forth in front of the man and stammering, I finally managed to part my lips, looked the man straight in the face, and said in a somber voice:
“My balls have disappeared.”
“Eeek!”
As if timed perfectly, the nurse who was opening the door at that moment screamed as if encountering a pervert and ran away, while deep wrinkles formed between the brows of the man who had been listening to me. The man’s attendant went through the half-open door and closed it firmly, while the caregiver, having missed her timing to leave, stood leaning against a wall like a decoration, gazing out the window, not knowing what to do.
“You right now…”
Like me when I discovered the absence of my testicles, the man also took a deep breath and then, in a trembling voice, barely managed to utter two words. It was now certain that deep breathing does little to help find mental stability.
“You… have really gone crazy. Have you decided to completely lose your mind and do insane things without caring about others’ perspectives?”
“…Wow, this mister speaks so harshly. Is this how you respond when I tried to speak politely? Seriously, what could be more serious than this? As a fellow man, tell me. When your balls disappear overnight, is this something you can be calm about? As a man yourself, you should understand my bewildered and miserable feelings right now. Why should I care about others’ perspectives at a time like this? My balls have disappeared right now. My balls have disappeared!”
I vented my anger and emptiness boiling up from my stomach, and expressed the irreversible sense of loss.
Even if I might die tomorrow or the day after, shouldn’t a man preserve what’s important to his cock?
“What the hell did your hospital do? You save someone’s life and then do something like this? I’m going to sue. Huh? Your hospital will only come to its senses when this truth is exposed on the nine o’clock news with huge headlines? I’ll go to every newspaper office there is, and I’ll report this to investigative programs too!”
As I spoke, my emotions intensified. I spouted out what amounted to curses, and the man’s face, as he listened, transformed into an expression difficult to describe.
That expression resembled the face of someone confronting a genuinely insane person. It was an expression of incomprehension, irritation, disgust, mixed with fear. To give a simpler example, it was the face of someone looking at excrement that was both disgusting and frightening.
Why is he looking at me with that face?
After ranting and muttering for quite a while, I paused and glanced at the man’s expression. The man, who had been slightly parting his lips as if dumbfounded, barely managed to exhale with a “Huh.”
“Until now, I thought you were just pretending to be crazy. I thought it was the minimal rebellion possible for someone as emotionally and mentally weak as you. But it seems I was wrong. You… have truly gone insane.”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
