This story is true. It’s about my testicles. My fibrous, fibrous testicles.
But before I can tell you about my testicles and how I found out they were so fibrous, I must first tell you about my high school vice-principal’s testicles.
So I went to the doctor when I was 16, for what reason I cannot remember. In the waiting room I noticed my vice-principal and wondered why he was there. Naturally I assumed I would never know.
Later I’m in the office with the doctor and he’s talking to me about something related to my health. A nurse suddenly bursts in through the door. She’s all stressed out. “Doctor! I’m trying to prep Tim Connor for his vasectomy but he did a terrible job shaving. We told him he needed to shave down there but it’s like he barely even tried. So I’m shaving his testicles now and it’s taking forever and we are getting way behind!”
I instantly recognized Tim Connor (I don’t remember his real name) as my high school vice-principal. So I’m sitting kind of shocked by this situation. The nurse seems to be in nearly panic-mode.
Meanwhile the doctor is nothing but chill. The main thing I remember about him is that he wore socks with sandals. I found out years later he was a stoner.
So the doc is like, “It’s all good. It’s a doctor’s office. People expect delays. Just a vasectomy. Ain’t no open heart surgery. No need to get in a tizzy. We’ll get around to it.”
So the nurse left and I thought that would be the end of it.
Instead, the doc turned to me and said, “Tim Connor, that’s your school’s vice-principal. You know that?”
“I did know that,” I said.
“You know the name of your vice-principal?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s normal for a high school student to know that kind of thing.”
“He’s getting a vasectomy,” said the doc.
“I heard.”
“That’s the surgery that makes it so you can have sex without making babies.”
“Yeah, I know what a vasectomy is.”
“How do you know what a vasectomy is? That’s right, your parents do work in the lab.”
“I’m sixteen. It’s normal for teenagers to know stuff. Is it okay for you to be talking about this? Like, aren’t there patient confidentiality rules?”
“Woah! He’s the teenager who knows everything! He’s a doctor and a lawyer! Okay fair enough. You got me. Let’s refocus and talk about your health.”
Which we did, and I remember absolutely none of it.
And I didn’t do anything with that information about my vice-principal. I told only one other kid at school and otherwise let it drop.
So five or six years later, I was ready to have my own vasectomy. I thought I had good Karma coming.
Of course everyone was shocked I wanted to do it so young. People tried to talk me out of it. My girlfriend had an issue with it at first. But I was confident I wanted one.
I’m not sure why I was not worried about this surgery when my wisdom teeth surgery just a few years earlier had gone horribly wrong with massive internal bleeding that I believe nearly killed me. I blacked out for three days. My mom told me I would wake up screaming, rambling incoherently about demons stealing my soul. Somehow I didn’t heed that as a warning that maybe I should avoid surgeries. Sometimes you need to learn things the hard way twice.
So the doctor told me I would be in and out in five minutes. I’d be awake and only need a little local numbing–is it Novocain they used on my nutsack? I don’t know.– They said I’d be back to work in two days, a week at the most.
I remembered my vice-principal’s poor shave, so I promised not to do that to them so I spent a solid hour shaving my balls. Problem was I’d never shaved down there and had no idea what I was doing. It’s not the easiest or most comfortable for a first timer. But I did the best I could.
I thought I’d be fine but when I got into the office the next day and dropped my pants, the nurse gave a sigh of frustration. “Oh, no, that’s not going to work.”
I’d worked so, so hard at shaving and had still done a shit job.
So after an agonizing time letting a stranger shave my balls, the doctor starts the actual procedure.
Now, I know logically that the doc had a rolling stool that he sat on the whole time, but when I see this event in my head, he’s always down on his knees. He’s down on his knees with his face right near my crotch, peering as best he can into the hole he pierced in my crotch with his tiny laser pen.
“It’s so fibrous,” he says.
I can sense things are not quite going according to plan.
The doctor is getting more and more frustrated. “You have such fibrous testicles,” he says and keeps digging around. He grunts. “I can’t find the tube. Why is it so fibrous in here?” He takes a step back, re-orients and tries again.
I am staying as still and as silent as possible. I don’t know what he’s talking about but I don’t see any way I can help and I sure as fuck don’t want to make any sudden movements.
Now he’s even more frustrated. “So fibrous! I can’t believe this!” He stops and looks up at me. “How did your testicles get this fibrous?”
So finally I ask, “What are you talking about? What do you mean ‘fibrous’?”
“They’re tough!” He says. “It’s like cutting through leather! You don’t know anything about this? No one’s ever told you that you have unbelievably fibrous testicles?”
“No, actually. Believe it or not, you are the only person I’ve ever allowed to cut me there. I always thought they were just regular old nuts.”
“Nope. Looks normal on the outside but on the inside it’s a weird type of human armor that I have never seen before.”
So this goes on. The doctor is digging into my fibrous balls with a laser and some kind of pick or something. I know he had a mask on the whole time so this part isn’t actually true but I still remember his tongue sticking just barely out the edge of his mouth like a cartoon expressing focus.
“I think I found a tube,” he says. “It’s not really where the vas-deferens should be. I’m not sure if it’s a tube, but I guess I’m gonna cut it.”
So the doctor is down on his knees, sweating and wiping his brow like he’s Rodney Dangerfield getting less respect than usual.
I’m not exactly calm either but I’m perfectly still.
“I’m taking a sample to send to the lab.” A minute later he shows it to me. A tiny white donut on the tip of his bloody gloved finger. It did in fact look like a slice from a tube. “Does that look like a vas-deferens to you?” he asks.
“Dude how should I know? You’re the doctor!”
“No, it does not look like a vas-deferens, but it clearly looks like a tube of some sort.”
“So you just cut some random tube in my body and you don’t know what it is?”
“Well it can’t be anything important.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Yeah, pretty certain. I mean, there’s nothing else down there. We’ll send this off to the lab. Hopefully it’s your vas and it just looks weird. If not, I’m guessing it’s some skin folds that just look like a tube. I don’t know what else it could be.”
So he set the sample aside, sealed off the ends of the “tube”, and finished on my right side.
“Okay, now to the left side,” he says. “Hopefully this will be easier.”
The doc was down on my left side for a few minutes before I heard a happy sigh and a “Thank you.”
“Is it not as fibrous over there?” I asked.
“Oh no, it’s tough here too. I need a hammer and chisel, but at least your vas isn’t playing hide and seek.”
So this time he found the tube and the snip went faster.
By the next day, my testicles had swollen up nearly to the size of baseballs. Black and blue, horrible pain. Days on end watching movies with my legs spread in just the right position to take all weight off my balls.
This sucked. I took nearly a month off work. When I came back in they had printed out a picture of someone with beach ball sized testicles and hung it on the wall with a label that said “Kalin”. Even after a month, I was still waddling around, terrified my balls would slap against my thigh. I made my girlfriend wait three months before we could have sex again.
Oh, it was awful.
So this is where my mom comes into the story.
My mom worked in the lab at the local hospital. Her job was running tests on blood, semen, urine and other bodily fluids.
So she calls me up a few days after my surgery to see how I’m doing and says “Listen Kalin, when you’re ready to send off your semen sample, don’t send it to the lab. Send it to me. I’ve been in this industry a long time and I have seen some lazy, half-assed sperm counters. They’ll take ten seconds and don’t see any sperm so they call it good. If you see a bunch of them, you know you’re still fertile. But if you don’t find any, they still might be hiding somewhere. Most lab techs don’t care enough to actually go looking. I will. You don’t want mistakes here. I promise, you will not get a more accurate sperm count from anyone else, guaranteed.”
That seemed weird, but it made sense, so okay.
In the end though, the lab called after like a month and told me that the sample the doctor had taken was simply a skin fold and not a tube at all. This broke my heart. So much pain and lost productivity for nothing. They recommended I go back and let them make another attempt. I just couldn’t do it. So I go on assuming that my right side is still perfectly fertile. Even if we did get a zero sperm count, it still wouldn’t be safe to trust since we know he did not cut my vas on one side.
But somehow the story continues less than a year later when my cousin comes to me and says, “I’ve got my vasectomy scheduled, but I’m nervous after what happened to you. What was the name of your doctor?”
I don’t remember the name now but I told him then and he was like, “Oh fuck. I’ve got the same guy.” He was ready to cancel the whole thing.
But he went back and talked to the doctor who convinced him that I was a special case. “That guy was different. Those testicles were tough as leather and his vas was hiding somewhere it was not supposed to be.”
So my cousin went ahead and did it. He was in and out in five minutes and back to work two days later.