Vasectomy: what every man needs to know
About 30,000 Aussie blokes get the snip each year. Trent Dalton pauses beforehand to reflect on his beloved ‘plums’.
What are you so worried about? Father to two good kids. Husband to a happy wife. Your work here is done. Time to cut open the coin purse and close up shop.
Time for this pirate to get on the hop to Dr Chop. Raise the white flag me hearties, he’s cuttin’ his losses and cuttin’ his nuts. Gimme a “V” for vulnerability. Gimme a “V” for vertical incision. Gimme a “V” for vasectomy. Keep this quick, keep this quiet. Nobody needs to know nuthin’. Just another ordinary weekday morning: take the kids to school, drop quickly and discreetly into the chemist for a tub of depilatory cream, head to work whistling Disney tunes.
Suburban Brisbane chemist, 8.30am. Section names are flagged through the aisles: “Body & Bath”, “Foot Care”, “Antacids”, “Oral Hygiene”. This must be me: “Hair Removal”. A dizzying row of women’s products. Vagisil? No. Summer’s Eve? No. Restore Vaginal Moisturiser? Yikes.
Then a familiar voice echoing from the sliding entry doors. “Is that Trent Dalton by the hair removal section?” It’s Willie Herron, sweet local school mum, former press adviser to John Howard, funniest woman south of Tina Fey. All the twin-pack boxes of Femfresh Feminine Wipes in all the world couldn’t remove that smile. “I don’t believe this,” I say, searching for the chemist sections marked “Invisibility Creams”, “Shame Care”.
“What?” she says, laughing. “Hey, don’t be embarrassed. But if you’re getting a Brazilian for some young mistress I’m telling your wife.”
I say it in a whisper: “I’m getting the snip.” Phase one of the delicate male contraceptive operation that more than 30,000 Australian men undergo/endure each year is to clear a pubic forest left so grossly untended for two decades that it resembles the backyard of a widowed and reclusive alcoholic New Orleans millionairess.
“Ohhhh,” says Willie.
“But I don’t know what I’m looking for here,” I say, lost and confused.
“Oh, let me help you,” Willie says, calming, hunching down to scan the lower shelves. “Now… you don’t want ‘Face’, you want ‘Legs and Body’,” she says, her fingers walking along various tall rectangular boxes and cylindrical cream tubes. She looks up at me curiously. “Do they need the whole rug removed?” she asks with a nurse’s matter-of-fact pragmatism.
“Pretty much,” I say. “It’s at least a very large quadrant of the rug.”
“I’m guessing you’ll want ‘Sensitive’?”
I nod, wincing for the poor bastard who removed the hairs on his scrotum with insensitive depilatory cream.
“Here we go,” she says, handing me a tall box of cream. “That’ll do the trick.”
“Thanks Willie,” I whisper, never more sincere.
“Good luck,” she says, sending me off with the dearest, most encouraging clenched-fist air-pump that makes me feel like I’m a young soldier boarding a boat to some dreadful Middle East peninsula, except instead of a rifle I carry a box of Nair hair removal cream with moisturising sweet almond oil.
Who am I? All this morning traffic and all this talk of final cuts has got me all existential. Who are we men? What’s our purpose on Earth? Am I not just a bipedal bull in Levi’s jeans, just a 36-year-old sire strapped into a Toyota Corolla blessed with just enough knowledge to navigate a vagina, with some bonus brain space for fire-making and the songs of Alanis Morissette? What will my universal purpose be when I’m put out to pasture, post-semi-sort-of-gelding; what driving force will push me through my new life as a seedless watermelon? Beep, says a car behind me. Quit daydreaming, that car says. Your day is waiting for you along with your death, that car says. Hurry the hell up.
That night, a scorched-earth nuclear winter localises around my taters. I’m in the downstairs dunny pondering the corrosive powers of Nair hair removal cream in the war on Islamic State. I’m out of dunny paper and my hands are filled with large, foul-smelling, apricot-coloured depilatory cream-filled hairballs the size of cupcakes.
Nobody told me about this prep work. I know a dozen blokes who have been here before and I’ve asked them all the same roundabout question: “What’s a vasectomy like?” They all offered the same kind of down-note whistle and pained head shake, like ’Nam veterans recalling some buried darkness. We don’t much talk medical business. I’ve got a close mate who beat leukaemia as a boy and we recently toasted his past two decades of survival over a beer. I asked him to share some deep insights into the miracle of his existence and what his great second shot at life has taught him. He thought for a moment and said, “It’s pretty good ’ay”. He then shook an empty glass: “Beer?”
One well-read mate, schooled in the intricacies of the V-sec, did say something about a “Vas deferens”, which sounded like a Dutch indie rock band, and an “epididymis”. The Vas deferens, he explained, was life’s highway found inside my yam bag, two tubes transporting sperm from the epididymis, a flesh coil some seven remarkably cramped feet long attached to the rear of each testicle. The snip, he explained, is the road gang in the middle of life’s highway eating Subway footlongs before a wall of orange and white plastic barriers. My sperm are the Gen Y hipsters speeding down the Pacific Highway in a Mustang not realising their endless Burleigh Heads surfing holiday was over before it began.
“Aaaaahhhhh,” I bellow, fingers dripping with gunk.
“You OK, Dad?” says my nine-year-old daughter outside the toilet door.
Love that kid so much. She’s all heart and soul and compassion and intuition. She got the good parts of me and none of the rubbish parts, none of my male pride and ego and insecurity. She, alone, would have been enough to carry my wife and I through a thousand lifetimes. But the universe blessed us with another girl just like her except a few hundred decibels louder.
“Why you getting the chop?” a mate asked at touch football last night.
I don’t know, man, time I guess. Because the world keeps spinning and my testicles keep hanging there like the bells of the Brisbane City Hall clock tower. For whom the balls toll, man. Because my wife raised it two years ago and I’ve been putting it off since. Because for 16 years I’ve watched my wife pop pills in the name of beating my eager beaver baby-makers back from the pearly gates of childbirth, a monthly cocktail of drugs that have been linked to everything from cancer to weight issues to depression to moustaches. Because I watched her make endless appointments about bodily things I don’t fully understand in the name of family planning; because I watched her waddle through two Brisbane summers pregnant; because childbirth, from what I’ve seen of it, is a bloody gruesome trial and all that I really ever contributed to the arrival of our children could be reduced to a single chipper bedside platitude: “You’re doing great.”
Because after recovering from a deep vein thrombosis two years ago, my wife was given the rather unexpected news that it was now too dangerous for her to have any more children but she could also no longer take the pill.
I used to think I might want another kid, a boy maybe to play cricket and watch Pearl Jam DVDs with. Until, that is, my daughter bowled her first right-arm medium-pace delivery down at the local dog park and I realised all I was holding on to was a load of first-world bullshit and my first-world scrotum needed to man up.
“I’m all right, sweetie,” I say through the toilet door.
I’m reasonably fond of my plums. We men consider them quite valuable, kind of bobbling beacons of manhood, the walnut-shaped manifestations of a life well lived that knock together only to remind us of our spiritual and physical wellbeing. Our great Achilles’ heel, throbbing source of our greatest triumphs and disasters. Our great levellers; kick the toughest, richest, coolest, most influential man in the marbles and he too will sing like Julie Andrews. Watch us around turnstiles, climbing fences, mounting bicycles with high seats, we guard those dear little olives like they were made of a fine glass blown into being by the very breath of God. The fact English cricket great Tony Greig wore a box for groin protection against a blistering 1970s West Indian bowling attack well before he wore a helmet is a deeply illuminating insight into the male psyche.
I’m nervous about having a stranger cut around my spuds. But my fears are unfounded. If there’s one man on this Earth who I would want to slash fine metal twice through my scrotum it is Dr Greg Silver, a soft-spoken, gun-barrel-straight medical veteran who has been performing vasectomies in Brisbane since 1985. Men in Brisbane’s west talk about Dr Silver in the kind of hushed, reverential tones normally reserved for Miles Davis and Monica Bellucci. Safer pair of hands than Rod Marsh, they say. Less a physician than a master weaver of testicular tapestries. He’s deftly cut men in the thousands. He’s supported men through whole adult lives of sexual activity, as they’ve had vasectomies, then vasectomy reversals, more children, then vasectomies again.
“By the age of 40, about 25 per cent of Australian men have had a vasectomy,” Dr Silver says. “If we put to one side those who are marched along by their spouses, I think men are being given and are accepting more responsibility for contraception. And, I guess, the population is being filled with more sensitive new-age guys.”
On a perfect Friday morning in Dr Silver’s clinic I hand over my vasectomy consent form, signed by myself and my wife, the co-owner of my testicles. “Take your pants off and lay down here,” Dr Silver says, gesturing towards a soft and lowdown surgery table. Dr Silver’s gentle and calming assisting nurse, Roslynne, delicately plops my penis to the left side as she tells me the clinic receptionist is an avid reader of The Weekend Australian Magazine, which I find pleasantly distracting. Avid mag readers are like family to me and family members don’t let bad things happen to the testicles of family members. Let’s go to work team. We can do this.
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: FREQUENT WORD PICTURES DESCRIBING NEEDLES AND SCALPELS GOING INTO WRINKLED SCROTUM FLESH. THE SQUEAMISH SHOULD PROCEED DIRECTLY TO THE PASSAGE BEGINNING WITH, “IT’S A VASECTOMY PARTY!”
With my naked eyes I can only see the white ceiling of the surgery and occasional flashes of Roslynne’s blue scrubs. My mind’s eye sees all. Pain paints a picture of the local anaesthetic needle Dr Silver inserts high on either side of my scrotum and that needle looks like a black and yellow hornet with the face of Donald Trump with a gleaming solid silver dagger for a nose that’s digging into my long-untainted bag skin. My body stiffens, my back arches and my teeth clench together so tightly I’m certain my post-op plans will involve a trip next door to the dentist. Lordy, that smarts.
The tinkering of tools on trays. Bright white lights. Then the wondrous numbing of anaesthesia. Do what you like Doc. I’m easy. I’m anaestheasy. Dr Silver makes a small vertical incision and he’s inside one side of the vault searching for his Mona Lisa, the prized Vas deferens. “Vasectomy is a piece of plumbing,” Dr Silver says. “We’re trying to pick up a tube a bit like a thick round shoelace.”
He uses small stainless steel forceps with a ring grip. “It’s all about finding the Vas deferens and separating the Vas from all the other structures in the spermatic cord. There’s blood vessels and nerves down there, there’s connective tissue and muscle, the muscle that elevates and drops your testicles when the weather changes. If you can’t locate and separate the Vas then the procedure’s not possible.”
He snips a portion of tubing, puts it aside. Roslynne shows it to me, holding it between a set of tweezers, a flesh-coloured glob shaped like a well-fed maggot. “That’s what helped make your kids,” Roslynne says.
“Wooooowww,” I say in drug-hazed wonder.
I keep my next thoughts to myself: “Farewell cute little maggot flesh. You’ve served me well.”
“The wonder of life,” Dr Silver says. “If you can think of the damage such a little piece of tube can cause financially, of course, it takes on a slightly different tinge.”
Now for the other side. Slice. Dice. That’s twice. Nice. Dr Silver threads the wounds back together with short white dissolving stitches. “OK, we’re done,” he says.
The operation is over in 25 minutes. Dr Silver helps my dizzy and drugged body to its feet. No tapes or dressings are used, just a loose gauze square kept in place by two of my old pairs of Bonds jocks. “Deepest thanks Dr Silver,” I say, sidling down the corridor from his surgery room like John Wayne after crossing America on a three-legged horse with no saddle.
It’s a vasectomy party! Three dads. Three days of medically directed couch time. In a rare stroke of male forethought and planning, two long-time friends, Brian and Chris, scheduled their vasectomies directly after mine. Between us we have 10 bags of frozen peas to stop the swelling, a slab of beer (strictly for days two and three; no post-op drinking for 24 hours), three live NRL games, six large pizzas and the entire fifth season of Game of Thrones, a thrilling TV show about a land filled with strong, virile men whose lives would be far less complicated with the adoption of some basic male contraception methods.
We share war stories. “How long was that needle?” “My scar looks like a moon crater.” “I feel like there’s a small monkey hanging from my nuts by his teeth.” My wife shakes her head. “Do you really have to make such a big deal about it?” she says, puzzled by our tiresome ruminations. “It’s what we do, honey,” I say. “It’s what we do.”
My balls look like they’ve gone a bruising 12 rounds with Apollo Creed from Rocky. I’m using McCain Baby Peas (“Sweet and tender”) on a soothing 15-minutes-on, 45-minutes-off rotation: “Aaaaahh McCain, you’ve done it again.”
My daughter comes home from school and runs up to me for a hug, all crotch-endangering arms and legs. “Gentle sweetie, gentle.”
“It’s bearable but it’s not something to take as lightly as advertised,” Brian says after a particularly searing period of sack pain. He’s right. The aching is worse, at times, than the wry mates’ smiles give warning to. The first casualty of male contraception is the truth. The nagging discomfort continues for five days to the following Wednesday, when it’s time to remove my stitches.
My truly loving wife attends to this tricky business with a torch strapped to her forehead, scissors and tweezers in her hands removing white threads from my wounds in a groggy and torturous bout of sharp tugging and cutting. “I should get into microsurgery,” she says, concentrating like an explosives expert in a Bruce Willis action movie deciding whether to cut the red wire or the black. Snip. Phew. My testicles did not explode. Breathe. So that’s that.
“You know,” I say to my wife. “I really think I should write about this. We men could always use a bit more discussion around our medical issues.” From somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, a line of ancient wisdom – Native American, perhaps? – pops out: “Man without seed sews knowledge in its place.”
Yes, there it is, ringing in my ears like the bells of the Brisbane City Hall clock tower. Purpose.
“No,” my wife says. “You’ll put it all out there and you’ll make yourself look like an idiot.”
“It’s what we do, honey. It’s what we do.”