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Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

Another person with orchialgia here, it sucks. Mine's been on and off for almost 20 months now. After three urologists I found something that worked (and it's like a miracle).

Something you touch on here implicitly is how much it changes little things in your life. For me it was long commutes, I can't sit for extended periods of time.

What I would add is that doctors can be great for things they recognize and can treat. With something like chronic pain that can manifest due to numerous causes and doesn't outright kill you, doctors can be very unhelpful. It took a really bad bout of pain to see a new urologist who diagnosed it as a damaged nerve and prescribed a device that works.

Not everyone is the same, but my experience led me to believe that if you suffer from chronic pain you just have to keep shuffling specialists until you find someone that's read different research than the others that works.

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Yeah, regarding doctors I'm not sure anything they suggested help. The first one I saw that it was an infection and gave me antibiotics. That didn't seem to do much.

Then as it persisted another urologist thought it might be urine backflowing down my vas deferens and I took beta blockers to improve my urinary flow.

Finally the urologist basically said that sometimes after you have an infection you can have idiopathic pain for a long time afterwards.

And maybe that was it. It pretty much went away on its own. I feel quite fortunate for that, because it really sucked. If it had persisted I suspect I would've seen quite a few more urologists!

I had something like this that landed me in the ER. I got a diagnosis of deferred kidney stone pain at the time. I too was all about which way to sit in a chair. I can't imagine that going on for weeks.

I had a similar problem, no urologist could tell me anything meaningful. After some time and a gigantic load of stress, I randomly stumbled upon a guy who had the exact same problem as mine. He did a shit ton of analysis, tests and scans. In his case, it ended up being a pain coming from a herniated disc. Coincidentally, he had the exact same disc being herniated as mine - L5S1. Once he told me about that, it all clicked for me, as I usually had pain sitting in a weird position. My brain just couldn’t identify the origin of the pain, and I thought it’s coming from my balls.

Given that it resolved itself on its own, I'd assume that wasn't the case for me. But it's very interesting how referred pain can be so confusing!

What worked?

No joke, a vibrator applied to the inguinal area. It's a little uncomfortable and probably has a hefty dose of placebo effect but I'm told it's like a reset button for the way the brain interprets pain from the damaged nerve. Like sending it garbage data to trick it into clearing its cache.

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