Conversation: Ball breaker

Billy Mann was not expecting this particular slice of life...

He came and sat down beside me. The large room was virtually empty, so anything spoken in confidence had a good chance of staying that way. 
"The doctor wants to whip off one of my bollocks."
I was not totally blindsided by this statement. He had told me before of the difficulties he experiences in that area. Chief among them was persistent though sporadic testicular pain, the result, he says, of a digestive disease he suffered some years earlier. "That's where all the poison ends up, in your bollocks."
The pain, he said, only arrived following exertion and was controlled easily with generic painkillers.

"If I was in constant pain, I wouldn't hesitate. Straight under the knife, but as it is I can live with it. The doctor still wants it chopped off, though."

I held both hands between my legs, pulled a tortured face and quietly squealed, "Oooo!"
He went on: "He's determined, but I told him I was quite attached to it."

I wanted to ask, "Left or right?" but bottled it, and took a pathetic stab at levity instead.

"Didn't Hitler only have one plum?"

"Nah, that's a myth."

"So, if they lop one off, do you get some kind of falsie to fill the space? A gobstopper thing?""Yes. It's like a ballbearing, same size, same weight. They just make a little slice, pop out the bad ball and put the ballbearing in."

I wanted to ask if he thought a man's attachment to his scrotum can be compared with a woman's feelings about her breasts, but the question seemed unnecessarily stupid and the answer seemed selfevident, so I bottled it, made some excuse, and scuttled out of the room, walking as if I had just dismounted a horse.