BALLSACK VINAIGRETTE
Hunk of Spunk
How My Husband’s Semen Almost Blasted us Into Being the Vasectomy-Reversal Poster Family
If you and your partner are counting down to the “Big Snip,” ask yourself one question:
are you friends with the dude who can re-engage you with your own hot payload?
Meet “Dr. Dude,” the man, the myth, the liquefaction legend. He’s the one from a major city in the United States and has the following “lovin’ spoonful” of alphabet soup after his name: M.D., M.M.H., F.A.C.S. Obviously, this is an alias, but he really shouldn’t be hard to identify. He’s like the internist who examines The Dude in The Big Lebowski. As one of the planet’s premier nutsack microsurgeons, he is “a good man. And thorough.”
Whenever a couple has changed its collective mind about a vasectomy, Dr. Dude re-installs balls.
Why the change of heart for us? Joe and I had rushed into the sterilization thing headlong. After having had three babies in two and a half years by the time we’d reached our mid-twenties, we were done, done, done.
But against all odds and reason, I convinced my baby-whisperer husband to keep breeding with me. It only took five years and a heartfelt promise that this would be the LAST time I would be hitting Joe up for a mini-me.
Narrator: It would not be the last time.
It’s more than a little trippy to think that Dr. Dude’s skilled hands are the reason half of Joe’s and my kids are earthside. My husband is an aerospace manufacturing engineer. This surgeon also happened to be interested in space tourism. Doctors and their patients — even their most satisfied ones — aren’t really supposed to be friends, and we’ve never actually hung out with him or talked outside the confines of his office. But he seemed pretty cool.
And he did let me “help” Joe jerk it in an empty exam room, whereas spouses are usually left to their own devices — literally — when procuring a postsurgical semen sample.
If that’s not a healthy sign of professional goodwill, I don’t know what is.
But unlike Donny-from-Lebowski’s coffee can of cremated remains, Dr. Dude is not “the most modestly-priced receptacle.” I saw a very nice car in the parking garage when we arrived at 6:30 a.m. for Joe’s surgery. Unlike a vapid Los Angeles debutante, I don’t want to drop brand names. But his vehicle started with a B- and ended with an ‘entley.’
Before Joe had even shaken off his load of anaesthesia, I knew it was gonna be worth that top dollah.
“Who shaved my balls?” He immediately wanted to know, still totally out of it from the Propofol.
“I think it was Sherri that shaved your balls!” One of the older nurses pointed to her younger colleague and giggled at my handsomely-stubbled husband as she walked past his gurney. His chin may have been stubbled, but his balls were silky-smooth.
The recovery room nurses had questions for me, too.
“Are you the second wife?”
“I’m THE wife,” I shot back.
Well. That settled things. They’d had a point. Usually when a couple wants to reverse a sterilization procedure, there is a new partner involved. We were the weirdos that had simply changed our minds, when the initial snips had been snupped at 25 and 23 years of age.
Back to my husband’s hot, chunky load.
Due to the expensive nature of the procedure and the need to control for potential “blowout” of the healing vasa deferentia, the reversee must abstain from ejaculation for a full 30 days following the surgery.
Joe wasn’t pleased. But I made him promise.
“No ejaculating. Ever!”
“But the doctor said it’s okay if it happens by accident in my sleep…” He was looking for a slippery loophole somewhere.
“I am gonna be pissed if we wasted $9k out of pocket! Don’t even do it in your dreams,” I warned him.
This meant that Joe couldn’t watch porn or jerk off at all. Even when he was alone at a hotel for a work conference later that month. On a daily basis he complained. He was more and more hangry for sex. But he kept his word.
Dr. Dude had been doing the reversal thing for a long-ass time by the time we sauntered into his clinic for the first follow-up. He’d seen a lot of splooge. He looked at Joe’s sperm under the microscope as they swam around between the cover slide and glass.
“They’re packed in there like bees!” exclaimed our doctor.
Joe beamed.
“If every one of my patients had patency like that, I’d be thrilled,” Dr. D. breathed.
I was no slouch, myself. Since I was what is known in the infertility community as a “one-hit-wonder.” It took only one month to knock me up with our fourth child. 37 weeks later, an impossibly cute baby boy arrived.
“I like being a new dad in my thirties better than I did in my twenties,” Joe told me as we drove home from the hospital. It was nearly nine years after we’d taken this first postpartum drive with our oldest child, and we were no longer poor, new college grads. We were veteran parents.
But there we were, still driving a sh*tty car. The more things change, as they say.
We sent Dr. Dude a Christmas card with our beautiful family that he’d helped create. And again, two years later, when our fifth child was born.
After our sixth child came along, Dr. Dude finally popped the question.
“You’ve got a photogenic family,” he emailed, after receiving our yearly Christmas pic. “How would you feel about appearing in some print ads and marketing materials for my clinic?”
We were game. But by then we had already moved hundreds of miles away for Joe’s job. We had lost our chance to endorse Dr. Dude with our pleased faces. Maybe we’ll call the good doctor when money gets tight, fly down for a quick photoshoot, and ask for some royalties or something. Would $0.10/motile sperm he returns to “circulation” sound fair?
“So, now that we’re REALLY done doing it for procreation, should I have another vasectomy?” Joe recently wanted to know.
My answer was as vague as my IUD was securely in place.
“That had not occurred to us, Dude.”
And now, our un-snipping story is spent.
(Special thanks to Jennifer McDougall for editing this seminal work!)
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