To Snip or to Tie, A Discussion on Sterilization.
You often wonder after the birth of a child if you'll ever have
sex again. Those sleepless nights, constant interruptions from a
squalling infant, and a tender tussy means that you aren't doing
your part to hold up the national average for number of sex acts.
By the time your second child is born, you now have those interruptions
multiplied by two and the lack of spontaneity makes love-making
a scheduled quick interlude, or a pass-in-the-hall was-it-good-for-you
kind of experience. Forget about foreplay, intimacy, or the unbridled
passion you showed in making the new addition; you are much too
tired.
The possibility of becoming pregnant takes on the same terror you
felt at seventeen when experimenting with sex for the first time.
You absolutely can't get pregnant right now. Then it slowly dawns
on you that if you have another child you will be outnumbered. You
may decide you absolutely can't get pregnant ever again. When that
realization dawned in our house, we realized that we were so
finished breeding, and it's time to get fixed. Unfortunately, there
isn't a magic pill that has been invented which instantly renders
you sterile. The choices are to send your partner for the big snip
or to get your innards manipulated and tied off. For him, it's a
quick trip to the doctor's office, then home to sit on the couch
moaning, beer in hand, his testicles nessled under a bag of frozen
peas. For you, a tubal ligation or female sterilization is day surgery
under general anesthetic, where they enter your peritoneal cavity
in search of your thread like fallopian tubes and make them impassable
to any wandering egg you may yet produce.
The current school of thought is to push for the vasectomy. It's
quick, and relatively painless with the "new" non-scalpel
variety. A local vasectomy expert Dr Weiss, claims he can do up
to sixty patients in a single day. That's one hundred and twenty
unsuspecting testicles. Here's a description of the procedure: Patients
are asked to come into the office with part of their scrotum shaved.
The area is disinfected, and the vas deferens (the tube bringing
those pesky sperm out of the testes) is identified and held with
a clamp. A local anesthetic is injected into the testicles and a
further small amount of instantly activating xylocaine (or one of
the other similar "caine" brothers) in injected just under
the skin where the incision is to take place. An eighth of an inch
(3mm) is then cut to show the vas. About 1cm of vas is snipped away
and the end cauterized with an electric needle. The procedure is
then repeated on the other side. Sounds simple right? Well the stuff
that urban myths tell about and locker room discussions perpetuate
are all of the things that can go wrong. The most frequent is the
internal bleeding, where the scrotum swells up, turning black and
blue, and very, very sore. It's caused by excessive probing by an
inexperienced doctor, or more likely by playing pickup hockey too
soon after the procedure is done. You need to coddle "the boys"
for at least three days after a vasectomy to make sure that you
don't spontaneously combust, but after that the testicles should
make a full recovery. The other important thing to know is that
no matter how much care was taken, there is a one in 500 chance
of the vasectomy reversing itself, so doing a sperm count three
or four months down the way is essential to be absolutely certain
you will no longer father any more kids.
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