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The rise of millennial vasectomies

I’m sitting at a desk in Northumbria University library at 1pm on a Sunday trying to write this article. I have an office at home but I couldn’t write there because my son was downstairs vacuuming rooms that didn’t need vacuuming, the baby was wailing, and my daughter kept knocking at the door asking me to judge her fart noises. So I came here to write in peace. My wife’s at home with the kids. It’s Mother’s Day. What a chauvinist. What a sh*t husband. What a dick. I get what you’re saying, but you don’t understand. The truth is, my wife is getting the good end of this deal. She’s been away in Glasgow for two weeks attending lectures for work. She stayed in a hotel. She had breakfast alone. She had a second to think. She slept. I was here with the kids. I was at the battlefront. My day in the library? That’s the bad end of a negotiated settlement.

Everything is negotiated when you’ve got three kids. Any moment alone – minutes in the shower, a phone call, putting the kettle on – has a price which must be paid. It’s like you’ve clocked on at a crappy, full-time job assisting three bosses who need everything done for them – feeding, cleaning, transport, forms, clubs, beds, bottoms, doctors – and although you’re entitled to holidays, if you take them, your boss and all your work comes with you, so you don’t bother.

I’ve tried to explain this to nonparents, but they don’t understand. Why would they? I didn’t before we had kids. My wife and I used to think we’d have four children (we changed our minds after the third), great careers, foreign holidays and a life in London. All that has disappeared, leaving just three kids. People talk of it as a sacrifice, but that’s overdramatic. It’s more like you quietly sneak upstairs to smother your old life with a pillow while downstairs your kids watch Mr Tumble on the iPad.

My point is this: me and my wife are knackered. I’m 37. She’s 35. Maybe she’s 36. I don’t know. She doesn’t care that I don’t know. Our own lives are comically irrelevant. We exist in a stupefied daze of servitude. If you see photos of us from a decade ago, we glow. Now there’s a deadness in our eyes. It’s like those photos of murderers which make you think, “Of course they were murderers, look at their faces.” That’s me and my wife.

And my mind? Bad. Not good. I don’t read. I don’t have conversations. I watch TV, but crap TV, and always tensely and distracted, like I’m on lookout at a forward operating base – ‘Did you hear something? Is that the baby?’ My mind is mush. It shows in my work. If someone without kids wrote this feature, it’d be a lot better than this. I used to fizz with words and sentences and clever ways to transition from one paragraph to the next. Not any more.

Then there’s the sex. Look, it’s what you’d expect from two people who’ve been together for over a decade and who haven’t had a good night’s sleep in seven years, and who sometimes have to say to each other, “Is that poo on your sleeve?” We’ve been through a lot, some of it rough, so the sex is fine, but obviously there are times that I wish she was a twentysomething dirtbag and, of course, she’d prefer that I was a hot tub filled with rugby players.

We do it though, sex. Which is the problem. We don’t want more children. We need to recover our lives, our work, our fun, just a little. But my wife’s against an abortion, so we need to be careful, and she doesn’t want to return to the pill, or try an IUD, and neither of us is likely to be sleeping with anyone else so we don’t need STI protection. So, like a bruised boxer telling a cornerman to “Cut me, just cut me,” I booked a vasectomy.

Predictably, my wife’s found the whole process hilarious. I didn’t know much about vasectomies before all this, other than they usually prevent

“I exist in a stupefied daze of servitude”

pregnancy, and they hurt, but my GP printed off an information sheet and said he’d find out what the “referral pathway” was. Great. A few months later, I went to a large, multi-purpose NHS clinic in Newcastle city centre. The receptionist gave me a sticker to wear so that everyone would know why I was there.

After a few minutes in the waiting room, a man in scrubs asked me to go into a room with him. He told me to pull my pants down, then he squeezed my balls. I assume he was a doctor. I’d never had my balls touched by a man. It wasn’t great to be honest. It hurt. “Are they always that sensitive?” he asked. I said nobody had ever squeezed them like that, which he regarded as the end of the discussion. I asked if I should worry. He said not to. I will.

A nurse showed me to a bed and drew the curtain. I got undressed, put on a gown, then read a text from my wife: “I think I want another baby.” See – hilarious. In the operating room there were three people: the man who’d squeezed my balls, the nurse, and a second female nurse. The doctor injected my scrotum with a local anaesthetic. It felt like a needle being stuck in my scrotum. He cut my scrotum open. I think two cuts. I still don’t know. I haven’t looked. This wasn’t the worst bit.

Next I felt him tugging, pulling, rummaging. Not in a good way. I knew from my inadequate research that he was cutting two tubes that carry sperm to the testicles. They’d said I might feel it. I did. If I had to describe it, I’d say it was unbearable. Obviously it wasn’t as bad as childbirth, a point made to me several times when I’ve mentioned the pain of a vasectomy.

“My wife has found the process hilarious”

I accept that my agonised writhing was mere ‘manwrithing.’

Concentrate on breathing. That was my preferred method. I’d seen my wife do that when I held her hand during childbirth. It worked, but the medics preferred distraction, so they asked me about my work. It felt like a stressful interview. From my answers, the second nurse realised we went to the same school.“Nice to meet you,” I said. When the cutting was over, I think she wiped my balls.

The first nurse asked me my waist size. I said 36 inches. She handed me a jockstrap. It was too tight, but I didn’t want to admit I was fatter than I thought, so I forced it on. The doctor said I could leave. I got dressed and took a taxi home. My mother-in-law collected the kids from school. My wife texted to say her friend’s husband collected their kids from school a few hours after his vasectomy. I didn’t reply.

The first week was awful. My balls hurt, but so did my groin and up into my abdomen. If I lay down, I had to put two pillows between my knees to avoid any pressure. If I walked, I walked like John Wayne, as my mother-in-law put it. If I sat, I manspread. If my jeans rubbed against my balls, it killed, but after a week of abstinence I was also… agitated. So I asked my wife to help me check everything still functioned. It did, which was a relief.

All the guidance seemed to suggest there would be only mild discomfort for a few days, but I was still very sore after a fortnight. I looked online and wasn’t alone. Men were panicking about pain, erections, ejaculations, and even loss of length due to the nature of the stitching. I asked my wife to check my balls. She said they were black and blue. She compared them to pictures online and said mine seemed standard, then mentioned that she’d never asked me to check her bruised labia.

Since then, things have been fine. After a month, the bruising and pain were mostly gone, though I was still tender. I could exercise, as long as I wore supportive briefs. It took about five weeks for the stitches to disappear. Now I’m waiting for the four-month mark, when I’ll have to wank into a pot and drop it off at the hospital, so they can test if the vasectomy was successful. If it wasn’t, they’ll have to do it again. My wife would love that.

You might think that the best thing about a vasectomy is it frees you up to have sex without worry. I texted my wife to ask if that was the case for her. It wasn’t. She texted back to say that the best thing about my vasectomy was the fact that it was painful. I asked her why. She replied: “The sadist in me, I guess. I feel like it’s fairer that you’ve also experienced physical pain for the sake of our family.” Long may our happy marriage continue.