The Vasectomy

Okay, so it is vasectomy time at last. The day started with the youngest Manley throwing a whole large tin of golden syrup on the floor (which was harder to clean up than I had thought) which served to take my mind off the oncoming procedure rather well.

The eldest at school already, the lovely Helen came to collect the younger brace and took them off for a picnic, so there was no real excuse to do anything other than press on to the surgery.

It's a fair old walk down to Dr Watson's dungeons, but I am legally excluded from driving home afterwards, so a walk it is. Normally it would be no problem, but I have a fairly nasty cold and my knee is playing up, not to mention the ever increasing feeling of impending doom.

Of course the receptionists are expecting me and all have a bit of a chuckle - you would think that, by now, they would be used to this sort of thing? Anyway, i settle down for a read of HEAT and associated pulp dross. I did find a nice article about retreats for the famous, which appeared in two seperate magazines, each professing to be from a seperate publishing house, with the same imagery, decoration and words.

A good rant about the improbably low quality of today's print media does help a little, but then Dug arrives. Dug is my boss and, if you want a top Search Consultant, Dug's the man. He also has a new car, so whether his readiness to collect me from the surgery was entirely down to his decency as a human being and his excellent man management has to be questioned when measured against his glee at now having a manual gearbox. Either way, Dug is here to collect me and I have not even gone in yet. I do a little jig as I go to meet him and there is a level of forced jocularity, although we both know that today is not going to be about fun.

Eventually I am called in and Jim comes with me. She is needed to take video footage and photographs, as well as there being the reasonable chance that she might faint, which would lighten my mood considerably, but she is sent out by the nurse. Apparently the first stage is mine to suffer alone.

First off I am placed behind a curtain and invited to strip from the waist down. I have got my massive padded cycling boxer shorts on, so I am a little bit pleased to have privacy, but I have always found it most odd that I get to hide whilst undressing, but then the nurse comes back to prod around with my goods.

Anyway, I get a hot water bottle to apply to my freshly shaven testicles and the doctor arrives. Making a loop in the end of an elastic band (questioning unearths that these are just normal elastic bands and that, indeed, he asks his postman for them) he slips it around my ever shrinking penis (by the time I lost sight of it I essentially only had a tube of skin left, as my willy disappeared back into my spine to escape the hell of surgery) just below the head.

This slips off and I have to reattach it myself, whereupon a pair of scissors shaped clamp is passed through the loop and the clamp attached to my shirt, serving to pull my phallus up onto my stomach and keep it out of the way. A green sheet with a small hole is placed on me, with the target items on the outside and Jim is finally allowed in.

To be honest the nurse was a bit more upset when I showed the elastic band to my wife than I was expecting. She was positively horrified, from what I could gather, but as far as I am concerned, I am doing this for Jim and she has to put up with seeing it, warts and all. I have no warts on my penis or elsewhere.

The next problem is losing cameras - the nurse is quite keen on removing them beyond my reach, but I am adamant. Many people do not understand, but if I am going to go through this then it is important to me to know what happened. It is also worthy of record, just so that, when my memory fades and I recall a 40" blade and searing pain I am able to correct myself.

Then it's the injections. They really hurt. Here, look for yourself:



How much does it hurt? The "Little scratch" (and I was most disappointed that there was no "little prick" joke) was not too bad, but the actual injecting of the local anaesthetic was bloody awful. You are aware, no doubt, of the pain of a dental injection, when it goes all the way to the back of your throat? This is the same. Yes - the back of my throat.

Next comes the vasectomy itself.



I can hear it burning my flesh, I can see the smoke and smell the singe. You hear in that clip how the doctor says there 'It's not a soldering iron'?




Soldering iron?

Soldering iron.



Here the vas deferens has been brought to the surface and Dr Watson is burning through with the soldering iron:



The tube serves to take away the smoke and the smell.

The hole has been clamped and the vas deferens burned, so it is time to locate the other vas deferens now (the left one was first, then the right).

There are two clamps in this image - the sharper, more standard clamps, which are used to seperate the tissue and find the vas (the scrotum not being a sack, but a series of layers of tissue) and the special device used to seperate the vas from everything around it, with the curved ends:



After another round of anaesthetic, it is time for searching for the other vas:



And there it is! (although actually this is the left one again - the right side proved harder to work on and needed a second run - when the second run started I had an active nerve and Jim had to put the camera down to be with me.



All in all, it was not as bad as it might have been, but still considerably worse than I had hoped. I have a couple of giant containers for samples and Dug drove me home so that I could get on with some work.

I'll update on the recovery later.

To give you an idea of what is going on down below during those videos, here's a bollock shot. This chap cuts and ties the Vas, but mine was burned with the soldering iron: