The following is a running journal leading up to and immediately following my recent vasectomy.
Sunday 9pm:
T minus 14 hours
While I had been relatively calm during the day, now I find myself restless, with a generalized feeling of being anxious. Slight butterflies in my stomach make me desperate for a distraction. I watch music videos I would not enjoy, throwing my cell phone data usage to the wind. I pace through the house and use my phone to chat with anyone about anything; nothing helps. I discover a song I find mildly enjoyable; I listen to it 11 times.
Monday 12am:
T minus 11 hours
The world sleeps, but I remain awake. I am laying on my couch in silence when I become aware of a sudden, strange, and growing desire to create more offspring. Not children I would want to raise or be responsible for, mind you. Screw that! I am confident I want no more children in my house, but there is most definitely a voice coming from somewhere in the oldest parts of my brain telling me to step out there into the night and sire as many children as possible before the sun rises. I choose to ignore it. The voice in the back of my brain howls with desperate rage.
Monday 1am:
T minus 10 hours
Music brings no joy. Food turns to ashes in my mouth. I attempt to distract myself from this malaise by watching a Dave Chappelle Netflix comedy special; nothing is funny anymore. Tired, I yawn, but I avoid sleeping because it would only bring the morning sooner. Instead, I research ancient meditative breathing exercises traditionally used by warriors before entering battle. I wonder briefly whether I might actually go insane and become violent mid-procedure. I have a vision of myself breaking free just as the doctor comes at me with his implements of torture, stampeding my way out of the hospital like a goddamned escaped circus elephant, and fleeing into the forest. It occurs to me that this is basically the premise of the Wolverine comic where Logan escapes the Weapon X facility, and I chastise myself for having no original ideas whatsoever. Then, I salt the wound by reminding myself that having a doctor surgically de-fuse my testicles and attach a few titanium clips to my mangled plumbing is a far cry from having indestructible metal fused to my skeleton. I feel worse than before.
Monday 9am:
T minus 2 hours
I consider using a black Sharpie to write the words: "Please don't screw this up!" across the front of my pelvis. I figure if I have to take my pants off in front of strangers today, I want to be in charge of what they end up laughing about in their staff room later. I'm worried I won't be able to write letters legibly while upside down and backwards, so I decide against it. While a well-penned message might get some laughs, a series of half-written messages, one under the other, each all crossed out because of mistakes before there is no more room left and the good version has to be written sideways down the front of my thigh would just make me look crazy. I consider asking someone to write it for me, but I can't think of a way to word the request in a way that sounds sane.
Monday 11:30am
T plus 30 min
A nurse asks me to put ridiculous clothes on, basically a trench coat she wants me to put on backwards while I'm bare-assed, followed by another to be put on the right way. I'm given a blue hair net and blue slippers. I have to assume this is all to break your spirit so you don't fight back when the fun starts.
Monday [Time Unknown]
I'm on a table now. The nurse is talking constantly. She knows someone I know. Her mother was a teacher. She taught at my elementary school. She wants to talk about things: people we may know, places we may have been at the same time. I know she's trying to be nice, but I really wish she was a complete stranger. Anonymity would be much more comforting to me. I should have worn a Mexican luchador mask to this fiasco.
Going into this procedure, I told myself I was going to be the "funny guy", the kind of guy that cracks wise in the face of danger. I want this doctor to leave here today thinking, "God, I've never laughed so much during a vasectomy before."
When the doctor comes in, I manage to make a few cracks. Not my best material, I admit, but I tell myself I'm just warming up. The whole plan for my comedy routine unravels when I see the doctor pick up a needle. My sense of humour fucking evaporates.
Yeah, there are needles. That's all I'll say about that. There are needles where you don't want them. I try to forgive the needles because I know they are delivering anesthetic, but it ain't easy. I try to put all the internet research into pain tolerance and deep-breathing I did the night before to good use. I breathe out slowly through my mouth and really let my mind experience the feeling of the needles. What shape is the pain? If the pain had a texture, what would it be? What colour is it? What would the pain look like?
It's working. I'm doing okay, but then the doctor steps things up a notch.
It's difficult to explain to females the feeling of what happened next. I'm not sure if there is an equivalent pain the female body experiences, but guys will know what I mean. I know the doctor is doing things, but luckily I am so frozen I can't tell what it is. Foolishly, I think this is going to be a breeze, but then I feel a tugging that is very much coming from somewhere inside of my body. The problem with this is that the person doing the tugging is outside of my body. That means that somewhere between the middle of body and that doctor standing in front of me, something is not right.
"Uh, ohh, Spaghetti-O's!" says a crazed version of my own voice inside my head, "Now we're 'inside out'! Get it?!"
The pain that accompanies this feeling is that slow creeping sickness you get after being hit in the groin. The kind of ugly ache that hatches in your privates and then slithers its way up into your lower belly and makes you want to puke. If I had been standing, my knees would have buckled. The real problem is that this ache doesn't pass like it normally does after getting hit in the junk. No, no. The pulling feeling remains constant, intensifies even, and the ache that crawls into my belly starts putting family photos up on the walls.
My meditative breathing goes to hell. I officially no longer give a shit about the nurse's family summer cottage that is near where I live and maybe I've seen it with it's steep-sloped roof. My mind shoves that woman into non-existence. I'm pulling breaths in rapid, panting bursts, and when I exhale, it's in groans.
As a last ditch effort not to freak out, I ask myself: "What shape is the pain? What does it look like?" My mind goes nuts:
The pain looks like the doctor placing his foot on your crotch while wearing a hockey skate, and it looks like him trying to tie it up as tight as he can using your vas deferens for laces.
The pain looks like a toy clown puppet you had as a child. It had strings coming out of the bottom of it and when you pulled on them, the puppet's arms and legs would flail around like it was in a panic.
I start to feel weak; my forehead breaks out in a cold sweat.
I realize the nurse has not stopped talking to me the entire time. God knows what I have been saying to her though because my mind has left the building.
"Are you okay?" asks the nurse.
"Oh, yeah. Heh heh. If I faint, just keep going. Do NOT stop! Seriously!"
She fetches me a cool facecloth and puts it on my forehead. I am doing my best to hold on when the tugging/sick-in-the-gut feeling suddenly comes to an end, and the doctor steps away. Relief!
Oh, thank God it's over, I think to myself. I almost didn't make it through that! If I had known it was that bad I never would have done this. Oh, well. It's over and done with now, and I'll never have to do it agai---
"That's one side done," the doctor said, "Now we'll do the other side."
My heart sinks. In my mind, the doctor throws his other hockey-skated foot up onto my junk, and off we go again.
A few minutes in, and I'm not even pretending to be okay anymore. I hate everyone who has ever told me this procedure wasn't a big deal. "It's not that bad," they all told me. Jesus, what terrible things did all those people go through in their lives to consider this "not that bad"?! What in the hell was that bad?!
I'm gripping the edges of the table, squeezing the sides of my own skull, gritting my teeth, and almost hyperventilating.
"You look pretty pale," says the nurse.
"Keep going," I manage to say through lips that feel strangely dry.
I remember the ending of Braveheart, when William Wallace put on a brave face while being drawn and quartered. It bolsters me a little. I even considered yelling out, "FREEEDOMMM!"
The inside of my head is a bingo ball machine of thoughts, some of which only make sense as abstract associations about what's happening: kinked garden hoses, burnt fuses, people stomping grapes, broken elastics, the time I ran over an extension cord with the snowblower, flailing panic clowns having their strings pulled until they sna---
"Annnd we're all done. We just have to close you up."
My breathing settles and my mind comes back to me.
"Wow. Sorry about almost fainting there, guys. I didn't mean to be a baby about it, but I was NOT expecting that."
The doctor tries to make me feel better.
"No problem. You did seem to experience some discomfort there for a while. I'm sorry; the freezing doesn't do much for that pit of your stomach feeling. I had to search around a bit for the first side. Sometimes that can cause a feeling like you've taken a home-run swing between the legs. Some guys feel it; others don't."
[TRANSLATION: "Get out of my operating room you goddamned wimp! I have a bunch of other people waiting to do this whole procedure without batting an eye."]
The nurse is eyeing me pretty hard and says, "You're still pretty pale." Then she leans out the door and says, "Can someone bring me a stretcher? I think we're going to need one in here."
I'm being taken to the recovery area when I ask the nurse if she can wheel me past my girlfriend while I play dead with the sheet over my face. She laughs but declines. Oh, well. At least I got a laugh from someone this morning.
Monday 1pm
My girlfriend buys me Sausage n Egg McMuffins and then chauffeurs me home. Once home, she hooks me up with snacks for the afternoon, downloaded copies of my favourite shows, my cell phone charger, and ice packs. She piles everything around me so I don't have to move. It's only after she's gone to work I realize she's left me a Fruit Crumble granola bar rather than the Rocky Road ones I prefer. I'll mention it to her later.
Monday approx. 10pm
I master the art of walking like John Wayne. When I left the hospital earlier today I tried so hard not to walk like a guy who had just had a vasectomy, but now I've learned that you just kind of have to own it.
Tuesday 7:30am
It has stormed all night and my deck and driveway are filled in with shin-high snow. The snowplow has pushed even more into the end of my driveway. My girlfriend gets stuck in the driveway trying to get to work. I notice this, feel bad for her, and walk away. My neighbour ends up coming out of his house to help her shovel the end of the driveway and push her car out. Inside, I watch Star Wars: Rebels and eat a waffle.
Tuesday 11am
A friend of ours shows up in his truck to plow my driveway for me. Normally, not being able to clear my own driveway would make me feel like less of a man, but the good news is that I am less of a man now, so I'm totally okay with it.
Tuesday 11:30am
I'm standing in front of the shower, watching the water hiss down, trying to work up the courage to get in. I can't determine whether this is going to feel good, or like pouring battery acid over my gear.
I feel nothing. Almost concerningly so. Perhaps everything down there is dead now.
Tuesday 8pm:
Boredom finally overtakes me. My pain is tolerable at the moment, but I decide to take some Tylenol 3's anyway because it seems like such a waste to have them and not at least try them. I sit in the living room watching The Wiggles with my son, and think, "Meh, these things aren't any different from regular Tylenol," and then the universe wraps me in a warm fuzzy blanket. The Wiggles are suddenly very fascinating. When my son goes to bed, I spend the next two hours laying around, yawning, and listening to a screechy techno version of Ravel's "Bolero" on repeat.
Wednesday 4am
Wake up from a series of vignette-style dreams that will require a team of psychologists and many years of therapy to help me work through. No more Tylenol-3's for this guy.
Wednesday 2pm
My neighbour brings me food. Spaghetti pie. Score!
Wednesday 2:30pm
I find a website that allows you to custom build your own lightsaber. I spend a half an hour asking myself, "What kind of lightsaber hilt would represent my personality perfectly?" and "What colour of lightsaber crystal would call to me in the Crystal Caves of Ilum?" I take a few online Jedi tests to be sure. I have my credit card in my hand when I realize what a waste of money this would be. I close the website and put my credit card back in my wallet.
Wednesday 3pm
Did you know you can order customized Harry-Potter style wands online?! Some of these are pretty cool. Hmmm... I wonder what kind of wand would represent my personality perfectly.
Wednesday 3:15pm
My hips and back are killing me from laying around so much, so while I heat heat up a piece of my neighbour's Spaghetti pie, I decide to dance to "Everywhere we go" by SonReal in the kitchen. Now, I say "dance", but I can't dance even a little when I'm at my best, and with my John Wayne cowboy stance and general fear of making any sudden movements right now, my dance is more like a heavy nod and slight swaying side to side with my feet shoulder-width apart. Occasionally, I gasp and yell, "Agh!" before shaking one of my legs. The end result is incredibly goddamned gangster. I've invented a new dance. I call it "The Snip". You're welcome, world.
Thursday pm / Friday am
I attend parent-teacher meetings even though I am really not well enough to do so. I spend several hours sitting on a hard plastic chair with beads of agony-sweat forming on my brow. There are only two positions in which I can rest comfortably: one way involves me sitting on the edge of my seat, leaned forwards toward whoever is trying to talk to me, and the other has me completely leaned back in my chair, almost laying down. Half of the parents who come to see me think I am a caring person and a great listener; the other half must think I'm a wannabe "cool guy" who likes to take things so easy that he has no problem being all leaned back during a professional meeting.
Wednesday 11pm
After a few harrowing days where the healing process seemed to have reversed itself, and after a few instances where I was forced to contact other vasectomy victims I know to ask them about their experiences in a blind panic, I am back on the mend. I no longer feel as though it would be tempting fate to post a silly little blog about the whole experience. That having been said, if this blog should suddenly disappear, you'll know things took a turn for the worse.
