While this story actually occurs before the shoulder thing, I felt it more appropriate to place it afterwards. I don't know why, except that maybe it just needed to be impressed that I had a reputation at my elementary school for injuring myself. Perhaps faking injuries to myself might be the more appropriate phrase here. And it was true, too. I used to fake injuries all the time to try to get out of class. Of course, it wasn't like I hated academia so much, but that I was pretty smart as a kid (sadly, not anymore) and learned all the stuff I needed to know very quickly and got bored. This isn't bragging actually, I was very smart as a child. I have since drunk away most of the brain cells that were involved in producing said intellect, but at the time I still had most of them.
As I was saying, I had a reputation for faking injuries. So when I had serious injuries actually, for real, happen, they tended to be overlooked by most of my fellow students (and the teaching staff) as juvenile outbursts. This day was one such occasion. On the same playground where I would later rip my poor little childlike arm from its socket I did some pretty serious damage to the family jewels.
Picture, if you will, half-tires sticking out of the ground in a row. Not the big, tractor-trailer tires that you can hide and play in, just your run of the mill car tires. There were about six of them in that row, and being the uninformed children that we were, we made a game with them. The object of said game being to see who could push each other off the end of the row of tires without falling off oneself (I see a pattern forming here with playground equipment and pushing - I wonder why that's always the way with kids?). So another boy, we’ll call him Phil, and myself were struggling mightily to knock each other off these tires (I will admit now that I was losing, although it took me about 15 years to come to this enlightened realization). I put my right foot back in search of the comforting safety of another tire and (sadly) met only air. When I fell back I was still locked in my death grip with the small Italian boy across from me. He fell forward (knee first) into my, as yet, underdeveloped child-groin, landing square on my balls (hence the title).
Now the funny part of this story is not the slapstick-esque injury to my 10-year-old testicles, but rather what follows. You see, in response to this uncalled for violation of my nards, I spent the next two hours rolling around on the ground in pain and spouting the epithet "MY BALLS!!! MY BALLS!!!" repeatedly and with great emphasis on the words "my balls". Why, you might ask, did I spend two hours rolling on the ground like this? Well, it has to do with what I was saying about my 'tendency' to fake injuries. All of my fellow students and the teaching staff (many of whom had actually seen the aforementioned affront to my testes take place) stood around for the remainder of lunch, ignoring my cries of youthful agony, some of them even stepping over my twitching body to get where they were going - all because they thought I was faking it. It wasn't until everyone had gone inside, and stayed there for approximately an hour and a half, that someone actually came out and brought me inside. They proceeded then to call my mother who took me to the hospital immediately.
Now the down side to this story is, well, that I had a small Italian boy drop straight onto my nuts. The upside (and of course there must be, because so far this hasn't been the most humorous story (unless you’ve been able to picture me rolling on the ground and losing my voice with the cry: MY BALLS, MY BALLS - and if you can, it really is funny)) is that in the emergency room I got to have my prepubescent scrotum handled by, who I am quite sure was, the hottest nurse I have ever seen in my life (and that's including now - that says a lot. I used to work in a hospital). That's right. Young social leper though I was, I still surpassed most of my fellow students (barring that one guy that you all know, the one who gets caught in the field in back of school with an older girl) in getting some lovin'. And with a hottie nonetheless. It's a good thing I wasn't very neurosis prone at the time or I might have developed a very strange S&M thing about getting my nuts damaged and sexual pleasure