The Big Snip

(or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Having My Plumbing Messed With, Stepped Up and Booked the Appointment”)

Gord Fynes – I don’t consider myself to be a squeamish type of guy when it comes to medical matters of the body, unless it involves the voluntary giving of blood. Maybe it was all those biking and skateboarding incidents as a pre-teen that required several trips to the hospital emergency room for stitches that helped me overcome the shock and fear of the sight of my own blood. Both of my parents had backgrounds in the medical profession, so these were always calm and collected times while they would assess the situation and phone for a consult before deciding to head out to have me mended. In my early 20s, I had to be rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, so surgery and convalescence aren’t completely foreign to me.

Years ago, my father-in-law loaned me his copy of saxophonist Art Pepper’s autobiography Straight Life, which covered all corners of the jazz great’s life of debauchery. At one point in the book, Pepper goes into very explicit detail of how his vasectomy took place. Now, I don’t know if it was because I was tired, perhaps a little under the weather (it was wintertime) and riding a bus home after a long day at work, but while I was reading this particular passage, I had to close the book so that I could shut my eyes and, I’m guessing, faint in my seat. Me! Faint! To this day, I still prefer to chalk it up to exhaustion and bad-timing.

Throughout the years, I’d always heard stories from older fellows (former co-workers that had stints in the military, all of my in-laws, etc.) of “that” procedure. You know, the one performed in a man’s nether regions that is so delicate that most younger males would wince at the very thought of it. We all know the euphemisms: “the big snip,” “the snip and tuck,” “voluntary sterility,” “permanent birth control,” “having a stranger cutting your sack and capping your plumbing.” Before my daughter was born, I’d decided that I would forgo future reliance on latex birth control and undergo what is dismissively referred to as a minor procedure. Most of the married women I know, whose husbands had undergone this procedure, consider it to be the honorable thing to do. (It being a lot less invasive a procedure than for a woman to have her tubes tied. Duh.)

I recently became a father for the second time. My wife had somewhat of a harder time during this last pregnancy, more so than with our first child. She chalks it up to her body being six years older this time around. By about the halfway mark, she would be huffing and puffing while holding a spasmodic muscle, announcing in a semi-joking tone that “this is it…the baby factory is shutting down after this one.” I never really pictured us as being the types that would end up tripping over a large brood in our two-bedroom condo. Two children seems like plenty, especially now since we now have both a boy and a girl.

I’d joked during my wife’s heavy-duty labour that I would gladly exit the maternity ward and go and have “the minor procedure” done on another floor in the hospital and be back before our child was born. I’d even mentioned, in mixed company (doctors, nurses, our midwife – all there at once), that I’d go so far as to do it myself with some whiskey, a Gillette blue-blade, a mirror and Google. We all know that love can make you say some silly shit at the most inappropriate of times. It’s been said that you don’t announce to the world that you’re getting a vasectomy to see the reaction of others; you do it to get used to the idea yourself.

Last week, I saw my family doctor for a quick referral to a specialist whose field is The Gentle Vasectomy, which, apparently, is now a scalpel-less procedure. Full of bravado upon leaving my doctor’s office with specialist’s card in hand, I called and booked my appointment from the parking lot on my cell phone. The whole job, including the consultation, supposedly takes only about two to two-and-a-half hours. I’ve been advised that I should shave ahead of time and not to ride my scooter that day.

So, the date has been marked on the calendar in ink. I will try to refrain from doing any graphically detailed research between now and then. The whole debate of whether to freeze any of my, um, spirit, is a moot point; I’ve only to look at my two beautiful children, smile, and think of the soon-to-be similarities between myself and a movie prop gun.

Gord Fynes is a father, husband, civil servant and musician residing in the west end of Toronto. When not playing with his children or his Mac, he’s busy trying to think up worthy content for his weblog, Gordasm.org.