This was the morning scheduled for my vasectomy. The procedure was uneventful; at my request, the doctor gave me a milligram of Xanax for sedation a half-hour beforehand, so I wouldn’t be quite so tense about the local anesthetic injections, and that did the job of unwinding me enough that I wasn’t keyed up about being injected in the skin of my scrotum. Really, I was surprised at how little pain the local anesthetic occasioned, far less than when I’d had a plantar cyst removed four years ago.
The doctor used a bilateral incision technique, making a quarter-inch slit on each side to reach in and find the vas deferens. I was very surprised at how little pain was involved—the worst was when she had to struggle with getting the vas on one side exposed and isolated from the artery and vein that run right next it. After she was through and had sewn me up (three dissolving stitches for each incision), she showed me the two sections of vas she’d removed; they looked like quarter-inch-long pieces of small white plastic tubing, not at all gory or disgusting.
The whole procedure, from signing the forms saying “I’ll Never Ever Have Children Again In My Entire Life” (which, after all, is the point of it all) to walking out, took an hour and a half, which I thought was very good time. Afterward TxAnne, who was being my Designated Driver (I figured I didn’t need to be driving feeling as I did, and loaded up with sedatives) took me to La Madeleine for a late breakfast, and then she brought me home, where I got an ice pack from the freezer, took a pain pill, and went to sleep for several hours.
3 Responses to Kicked in the cobblers