No, there are no graphic pictures forthcoming, so there'll be nothing that will require any library staff member to employ the shoulder tap. It's just that I'm likely to forgo clinical terms and instead employ such slanguistic gems as balls, nutsack, and peepee used as a noun. As far as the vas deferens is concerned I'll probably just refer to it by its proper name, as I can think of no four-letter substitute.
Also seeing as how this post will be mainly about my down there and, depending upon how well you know me, you may not want to hear anymore about my down there than you likely already have, this may be an ideal time to go check email instead. If you do not know me well enough to know the history of my nether regions and are feeling left out, you can learn more about it by clicking hither or yon. Enjoy.
Alright. Are those kiddies gone now? Good. Oh, wait. That one kid's still peeking around the corner. Also, if you're at work, make sure you don't read words like balls and nutsack out loud.
Speaking of out loud, in the waiting room at the urologist's office I sat next to one of those people who likes to take advantage of the lengthy wait time by sharing her medical history with anyone who would listen, me included. To her credit she was also quick to talk about what a good doctor the urologist was. I don't mean to be judgmental, but I'm just gonna say it. This woman was what we like to call Ivory Recycling.
When her immediate audience stopped feigning interest she dialed up someone on her cell phone and spoke volume ten to him about it. Annoyingly enough, the call recipient also spoke volume ten so everyone in the waiting room could hear him express the sympathies this woman was clearly seeking. As far as I'm concerned the less I know about someone else's kidney stones the better. I felt like saying Get a blog, lady. But I didn't because that would have been rude, and y'all know I'm not like that.
I had been instructed to bring an athletic supporter as well as the consent form bearing signatures of both me and my wife which I did. The consent form started out with I [write your name] being of -- and then there was a blank line. I asked the receptionist if I was supposed to have written something here such as "questionable moral character" or "low social standing", but she informed me that instead "sound mind and body" would do. So I wrote them words on that paper and handed it to her.
As I was thumbing through outdated magazines trying to pass the time I noticed a patient emerging from the exam rooms making his way to the checkout desk where he was then provided two prescriptions and a plastic cup in which to bring back a specimen in six to eight weeks. Having previously been childless and needing to undergo chemotherapy, I also was familiar with the plastic cup, so I already knew what he would eventually discover, namely that making love to it is about as fun as it sounds. Oh well. By the stunned look on this guy's face, ejaculation was probably the last thing on his mind.
When this guy walked back out into the waiting room I could see that he was wearing sweatpants. My wife made me pack some too, but I left them out in the car. If you're going to be impotent, you ought to look impotent. Get it?
A nurse finally escorted me back to an exam room and instructed me to undress from the waist down, climb up on the table and cover my nakedness with what was essentially a Kleenex the size of a throw rug. This was more than sixty anxiety-riddled minutes after my scheduled appointment time and easily another ten minutes before I would finally see the doctor. I just rested on the exam table alternating between sitting up and lying back. Two large gooseneck lamps shown down on my paper-draped peepee.
Hey, I warned you I was gonna say peepee.
The nurse eventually came back in, put on gloves and announced that she was now going to see, as she put it, how well I shaved. With that she lifted up the paper tarp and rearranged me so she coud fully inspect the surgical area. I couldn't help but chuckle at her phraseology.
"I think I nicked myself. Is that points off?" I asked.
She said that normally it would be but since my scrotum was free of blood I was still okay. Then she disappeared for a while before coming back in announcing that her next task was to clean my scrotum. Note here I'm using clinical terminology only because that's what she said. At the doctor's they say scrotum. They don't say nutsack and stuff like that.
Again she rearranged my man parts and scrubbed down my business with baby wipes. This time she put on latex gloves which is fine with me. I'm not really into latex gloves but whatever. Besides while I'm sure she gave the guy with the cup a good washing too, I do feel more comfortable knowing she changed gloves in between so I don't get his cooties. Before she left this time she got another paper throw rug and tied two of its corners to the gooseneck lamps to act as a screen.
Finally the doctor entered the room and greeted me. I have a good rapport with my urologist because I've seen him several times over the past few years. After Meryl was born, I visited his office just to show her off to him. On my most recent consultation with him he gave me a hug. Not this time though. We were separated from each other by a makeshift privacy screen and I was pantless to boot.
There was some polite small talk and he asked me if we were really gonna do this. I said we were and so the agreement was made.
Much like at the dentist office when the dentist is drilling directly into your nerve endings and he tries to fake some pointless conversation with the false hopes of taking your mind off the procedure, so did my urologist attempt to fake me out by asking about my wife and kid. I was polite and responded but quickly tried to change the subject to the woman in the waiting room who was singing his praises. More specifically I just wanted him to know that people out front were talking favorably about him. I guess deep down I had hoped this would somehow encourage him to make the procedure more pleasurable.
Fat chance.
He continued the banter and promptly grabbed my one remaining testicle so he could fidget around with it and find the vas deferens. Now up until this point my down there medical repertoire included having my nuts jostled, my epididymis squeezed and even a testicle outright removed and never before had I experienced as much discomfort as when this guy was rooting around in my nutsack trying to find the spermadic chord.
I don't know that there's much he could have done to make it more pleasant either. I think regardless of how skilled the physician is, if someone's fishing for such a sensitive part of your reproductive system through your scrotum aka nutsack it just hurts like a sonofabitch. Come to think of it it was kinda like the sharp pain a guy gets from landing wrong on a bicycle seat after having jumped the Grand Canyon. Just not good.
Then came the injection. At least I think that's what came next. You see while I tried to keep up the pretense of discernible conversation with this man, things from this point on just started to blur. I never lost consciousness or anything (try as I might have). It's just that one loses all concern for polite protocol and social graces when his man parts are being knocked about, especially when the person doing the knocking isn't some highly paid woman in black latex saying bad boy bad boy. I've just heard. I don't know from experience or anything.
But really, I remember the doctor saying I would feel a pinch and a burn, the pinch being from the needle going in and the burn being from the medicine entering the site of the injection. While this wasn't nearly as painful as the previous game of Here-We-Go-Round-My-Gonad, it was at this point that I started to feel the sweat bead up on my forehead and nausea churn up in my gut.
I've since read online that some guys go into the doctor's office for a vasectomy and choose to listen to music while the procedure is going on. Looking back, I wish I had chosen this option also. As it was all I got to hear was clamping, snipping and my own slow rhythmic exhaling while I was trying to keep myself from passing out.
Other guys report being in a room with a mirror on the ceiling so they can watch the whole show while it's going on. Kinda like getting to star in your own personal episode of Nip/Tuck, I guess. I can think of little else that I would want to see less than a doctor poking around at my genitals with mom's good scissors. Though maybe this would have expedited the passing out process which would have been just fine with me.
I did express to the good doctor that I felt like I might pass out. He told me to keep taking deep breaths and that if I were to faint, he would still go on with the operation. Hearing that made me feel better. I told that same thing to an endodontist once and he got all surly with me like I was upsetting his schedule or something. With the urologist, I knew that me losing consciousness wasn't going to upset anyone's apple cart.
As it happens, I did not pass out mainly because there wasn't enough time to. The upside of being a uniballer is that a vasectomy only takes half the time that it does for most men. The ballwasher lady had told me that because the doctor was very good at what he does the whole procedure would take less than twenty minutes, but during my previous consultation a week before the doctor had told me that indeed mine would be about ten. I have to admit though that although it seemed like a lifetime while the whole thing was going on, I think from start to finish the time it took to complete the procedure was really more like four or maybe five minutes.
My urologist used the no scalpel procedure that everyone raves about. I've also heard people refer to this method as the Chinese method because it's apparently been standard operating procedure in China now for the past 25 years. A few things come to mind here though.
I am hesitant to refer to any method as Chinese for a couple reasons. First of all it sounds like one of those things we say is Chinese not because it is but because somehow associating it with the Chinese makes it seem more exotic and therefore more marketable. Also for whatever reason the Chinese have often been victims of racial nomenclatures they had nothing to do with like the Chinese fire drill or Chinese red lights.
Mr. Lee, how do you get your shirts so clean? Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
When I taught elementary school and a kid wanted to break in line, they would sometimes engage in what they referred to as Chinese cuts. This was a setup where if one person wouldn't let you cut in line, you asked the person in front of him for Chinese cuts. If he agreed, he would let you cut in front of him with the understanding that he would then cut back in front of you, thus earning you the place in line you had originally hoped for. More often this technique was used not so much to score a place in line as it was just to piss off the person who originally told you no but that you still ended up standing in front of.
Aside from that, it's just silly to refer to any form of birth control as the Chinese method. We're talking about a country that accounts for less than two percent of the world's land mass and yet twenty percent of the world's population. Do the math, people. Saying a particular form of contraception is Chinese in my opinion doesn't really lend to its credibility.
Anyway, enough of that. I'm tired of googling land mass and population statistics. I'll have you know I even opened up an Excel spreadsheet to come up with my percentages. This is because I care so much about you the reader that I want to provide you with accurate information. And also because I suffer from Need-to-Know-Worthless-Information Disorder. OK, back to the operating table.
Instead of cutting into my scrotum with a knife to get to the nutmeats the doctor apparently used a pair of specially designed really really sharp forceps. You can see a picture of the instrument by doing an image search online. I don't know that the thing looks any less scary than a scalpel does. You go home with stitches either way.
After getting dressed I went to the checkout desk to collect my prescriptions and obligatory sterile cup. I pulled the cup out of the bag and asked the receptionist if I could bring the specimen in from home or would it have to be collected on site. My doctor, who was passing by on his way out of the office at the time, patted me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry. We're not gonna make you do that here." Then the receptionist added that if I wanted I could have my wife do it.
Yeh, right.
Somehow I don't think this falls into the category of for better or for worse. Turning down the bed so I can go home and recoup I knew I could count on my wife for. She's a nurturer and all, but as far as collecting my bodily fluids in a cup, I think I'm gonna have to be on my own.
I drove immediately to the pharmacy to get my prescriptions filled. I tried not to walk funny but with every step it just felt like I had a ten-pound weight hanging from my scrotum. The athletic supporter I was wearing wasn't very supportive either except that the waistband in it was so tight it felt like it was cutting off my circulation. Upon taking it off later that day I'd realize it was a medium which is not the ideal size for a guy who sometimes has to rely on the Fatty McFat expando waistband so he can still squeeze into a 36" waist.
The pain I felt after that was really annoying. Not excruciating. Just annoying. It felt like I needed to make an adjustment only there was really no adjustment I could make that made things better. I tried both crossing and uncrossing my legs when I sat down. I tried the lift. The fidget. No matter how many rounds of pocket pool I played, I just couldn't seem to win. Furthermore I dreaded sneezing, coughing, laughing, shouting, walking, driving over speed bumps or even around sharp corners.
The weird thing was that my right testicle felt like it had sympathy pains for the left and the right one's not even real. It sounds like I'm kidding but I'm not. I noticed this same phantom sensation for the first few days after my original right testicle (the cancerous one to which I was biologically related as opposed to the saline-filled stepchild that's in there now) had been removed. They say people who have an extremity or a limb amputated go through the same thing. It's most unsettling to ache in a part of your body that doesn't exist anymore. Though, come to think of it you have to admit there is some resemblance here.
I also had this queasy feeling that I couldn't seem to shake for the rest of the day. I don't know if it was from the physical discomfort or just because I couldn't stop thinking about the procedure I had undergone. Maybe it's just psychosomatic, but for the whole day and into the next one I just felt like I could have thrown up at any moment. Thankfully I found that pain meds and booze helped alleviate the symptoms or at least render me happy to the point that I didn't care about them anymore.
I had the operation done on Friday at the direction of my doctor so that I could recoup over the weekend and return to work on Monday. I do have to teach that evening, but I'm giving a test and aside from that I'll probably do a lot of sitting at the desk and having students go to the board. Ahh, the joys of student-focused learning!
Vasectomy was a choice my wife and I made after having discussed it ever since our toddler was born. It just seemed like the most cost-effective and relatively easy form of permanent birth control. We are a family of three and my wife and I decided early on in the threesome that we both liked it that way. I also didn't feel comfortable asking my wife to undergo tubal strangulation when that's a much more invasive, expensive and uncomfortable procedure.
I got the vasectomy done three days ago. Sorry I didn't blog about it immediately but I just kinda thought my parents should find out from me directly as opposed to reading it in my blog. After all, I was carrying their genetic code too. I'm not 100% recovered yet, but I feel pretty good and I'm happy with the decision I made. If you're in the Atlanta area and want a referral to a great urologist, shoot me an email to cocktailswithkevin at hotmail dawt com and I'll hook you up.
That's basically it. Not much more to it. This is the exciting conclusion to what has been a very special episode of cocktailswithkevin.com I'll be back to my regularly scheduled mindless banter tomorrow. In the meantime thanks for having placated my ego by reading through all this explicit detail. I promise when it comes time to return the cup, I'll keep that business to myself.
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