Jake DeBrusk was one of the Bruins’ three first-round picks in 2015, and he had a bit of a rough go of things while playing for the WHL’s Swift Current Broncos last year.
During a game in October, DeBrusk took a slap shot directly to the groin that required surgery. As it often the case with hockey injuries, it was vaguely labeled a “lower body injury” and the rest was mostly kept secret. But, with DeBrusk participating in the Bruins’ development camp this week, he opened up about the injury to WEEI’s DJ Bean.
The details are horrific. DeBrusk was hit so hard in one of his testicles by a slap shot that it ballooned to the size of a tennis ball. Unsurprisingly, he fainted while he was at the hospital.
But wait, there’s more:
“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 Oct. 30. 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.’”
Once he got to the hospital, DeBrusk was loaded up with with painkillers and morphine. It took two hours before the pain subsided, and he actually fainted before going into surgery.
“I fainted right before the procedure and I was in [a hospital chair] and I was like, ‘How’d it go?’ and they were like, ‘We haven’t started yet,”’ he recalled.
Thankfully, the procedure was successful and DeBrusk’s testicle returned to normal. Though he couldn’t walk for a week afterward, he was back on the ice playing games three weeks later.
(Via WEEI)
