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The Vasectomy

Oh no, no, no: I squint into the blinding lights while the nurse snaps on latex gloves and my doctor shaves my scrotum. Then it’s time. He warns me: In a moment, I will feel a prick like a hornet’s sting—the local anesthetic. There it is, the sharpness easing into a spreading dullness. Weeks later […]

Oh no, no, no:

I squint into the blinding lights while the nurse snaps on latex gloves and my doctor shaves my scrotum. Then it’s time. He warns me: In a moment, I will feel a prick like a hornet’s sting—the local anesthetic. There it is, the sharpness easing into a spreading dullness. Weeks later a friend will tell me that if he had one bit of advice for someone undergoing the v-sec, it would be this: When the doctor asks if you can feel it, say yes. You get a second shot. When my doctor asks if I can feel it, I mutter something noncommittal, and he takes this as a green light and slices me open.

I don’t scream, but I clamp my jaw so tightly it clicks. I arch my back so much I end up looking behind me at the door. The technique differs from doctor to doctor. Some cut diagonally. Some puncture “keyholes” with a hemostat on either side of the scrotum. Mine scalpels a vertical slash right down the middle. The room is cold, but I am sweating. How I regret not accepting the Valium. The doctor explains the procedure as it progresses. Apparently some men don’t have pronounced enough vas deferens, the tubes that carry sperm outward from the testicles, making the vasectomy impossible. But mine look great, he says. I would tell him thank you if I had a voice.

He will now sever the right vas deferens and excise a length of the tube, making recanalization close to impossible. “Now,” he says, his voice lowering, “you may feel a hot nauseating spike of pain that reaches up your right side.” Nobody I have spoken to, nothing I have read, mentioned anything about hot nauseating spikes of pain. Before I can steel myself to the idea, I hear a snip. The noise of garden shears deadheading geraniums.

I am unable to breathe. I cannot see what the doctor is doing, but he very well might have shoved a furnace-baked length of rebar through my groin and into my torso. I am introduced to vast, intricate networks of pain I never knew existed.

No. No, no, no.

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