Last updated on August 25, 2020
Question:
Hi,
I was wondering if I can get your advice or opinion.
I’m 20 years old. A few years back I was hit hard in the testicles and it caused a varicocele to appear. I went and seen three different doctors and they all told me nothing was wrong, but I knew otherwise and did my research online. Since then the varicocele hasn’t really bothered me, but I moved to a new town recently (away from my family for college) and have been doing a lot of walking and it can bother me at times. Also, on a maybe unrelated note, can testicles shrink? As of late, I have noticed that mine have been looking kind of smaller, and I really don’t remember them being this small in the past, although it could be me just worrying. I measured one and it came barely to 1.5 inches. Any advice?
Have a great day. Thank you greatly!
Answer:
A varicocele is the same thing as varicose veins that plague older people. Your veins have small valves in them to keep blood from flowing backward as the heart pumps. It the valves were there, blood would pool in your lower extremities, stretching the veins. In both a varicocele and varicose veins, one or more of these valves have failed and allows blood to backflow, pool, and stretch the veins. The result is pain.
I would be surprised that a hit in the testicles would cause a valve to fail. If it did happen at the same time, it would be hard to differentiate it from a coincidence.
The pooling can be seen with an ultrasound examination since the vein where the valve failed will be bigger. So if doctors didn’t find a varicocele, then the pain may be due to something else. Since it happened several years ago, a guess might be some type of scar tissue that formed.
Since it only bothers you when you are active, a simple solution is to wear a jockstrap or compression shorts when you are doing something active. This will take the strain off the cords holding your testicles and likely eliminate any discomfort.
Unless an organ is dying, it doesn’t shrink. If your testicles were dying you would be having severe symptoms. The fact is that like most men you really don’t know what size your testicles were. Now that you are having some problems you are paying attention, but you are comparing memories, which are notoriously inaccurate. We tend to measure things by comparison, thus when your testicles grew as you reached manhood, they seemed huge because in comparison to childhood they are huge. Now that you’ve grown used to them, they don’t seem as big but it isn’t because they shrunk; it is because you are used to the size.