Dr. Jeremy Weiss held me in his gaze and stressed the importance of taking the time to heal. I felt something like wisdom, but it turned out it was my teeth. My long-departed wisdom teeth chattered an old incident that made Dr. Weiss' lecture so painfully necessary. I was young and dumb and, after the dental extraction, galloped home to take out the gauze that they told me to keep in. My girlfriend looked at me with concern. Partly because I hadn't followed doctors orders but mostly because she watched me gently spin to the floor. The room blurred into a Monet as I dropped in elevation. From my passed out mass, blood gushed from my face. The resourceful woman shoved Tampax in my mouth and ran to get more gauze.

So I nodded, and agreed. I'd have to take it easy. I'd also have to watch a lot of Netflix. It's been wonderful.

This vasectomy is the first time I've been cracked open. That little stitch in my nethers is the cornerstone of my latest imagined horror. I'm going to be that guy who lifts a credenza and my compromised scrotum shoots a testicle across the room. So I've been very careful and, I kid you not, the frozen peas are amazing. Cliches are often cliches because they're so damned true. And I'm not out to set any new trends here.

The kids got home and I never realized how many times they hit your groin. I kept the boys at bay but the toddler couldn't stop landing in the wrong spot. It's not what you want your kids to see; their patriarch wheezing and squealing and terrified of a small child. But what really caught me off guard were the questions about finding their father in a compromised position with frozen vegetables. I explained the basics. It was a thing that needed to be done and it was done in a very sensitive area. I gave them the specifics of the locale and it kind of shut them up. Kind of like when a women invokes "girl problems." Everyone just seems OK leaving it at that.

I have to recommend Dr. Weiss. He was good (although my spectrum of men who've handled my halfway with a knife is limited to one) and a real Colorado guy even though he's from Houston. And I've noticed that people who aren't from Colorado try to be even more Colorado than those who are from Colorado. He did the surgery with his outdoor vest on, something like a North Face fleece. I was impressed with that. He went about my vas deferens like he was fly tying by a mountain stream.

Anyway, he had to deal with my scrotum which, by the time he got to it, looked like a traumatized bird. I'd taken the liberty of shaving and was pretty proud of my work. That's how the day began: Sarah shouting at me through the shower door, "Have you looked at any tutorials online?" I hadn't but after my battle with Aetna I wasn't going to take any chances. Would the shaving be extra? Would they tack on some kind of salon fee? Sarah did find some informational articles but I'm not sure if any described how weird it is. It's somewhere between diffusing a bomb and shearing a frightened animal. I highly recommend it as a moment of humbling self reflection and/or holding women in high regard/suspicion for the sacrifices they make for their ladyscapes.

In the surgery room it was just me and a doctor. Occasionally a young man and woman would arrive, providing him the necessary pieces. It's awkward. There's this little tiny bed on which you lie bottomless and naked. He rolls a table over with his tools. There's some kind of soldering kit hooked to an electrical box. Torture procedures and the medical community are forever linked.

He went to work quickly. He had told me, and this is important, that when he puts that clamp on, despite the local anesthetic that's needled into your satchel, you're going to feel some discomfort (pain). He described it perfectly by saying it's going to feel like it's never going to subside, like its just going to keep climbing the pain scale and never come back. However, it stops quickly, and it did. But that little shock hit my berries with the gentle persuasion of a stun gun. Yes, it's going to feel like you've been kicked in the nuts, but this guy was good and fast. We even made conversation while smoke rose from my scrotum. I believe that was the soldering of the tubes. I could have some trouble with camp fires for a while.

I mean other than that, it was fast. And props to a guy who can weld your balls and still be likable. Yes, my guys are purple. They look like Gonzo post chemo. And, yes, I'm walking like I rode a horse home. But the vasectomy, I feel, is the right thing to do. It's a quick thing that gets my wife off the hook for preventing more population and provides finality to the kid thing in our house. I mean outside of raising the ones we have. Again, thank you children for the inspiration.

The three most important lessons I've taken from this are that shaving is weird and that the clinic will do it anyway. Secondly, the actual vasectomy is quick and relatively painless (compared to the epidural-inspiring pain of child birth). Finally, and most importantly, take it easy for a couple of days.

If you don't have a wife like mine who's been trained by your neglect and once forced to shove feminine hygiene products in your mouth, then you're going to have to police yourself to take it easy. It's fantastic. I'm going to rest more often even after this heals, which should be much easier to do without the fear of my groin exploding whenever I sneeze.

How I got a vasectomy part 2