An Idle Life is the Malpractitioner's Playground

Includes sexual language and description.

Accredited medical professionals (neurologists, psychiatrists, general practitioners, etc.), tortured titans of the art world (poets, oil painters, filmmakers, etc.), and modern-day philosophers (YouTubers, TikTok creators, Twitter X users, etc.) agree: thou shall not live in a state of transience, for it may impress dissatisfaction unto thine psyche. They might not say it exactly like that, but that’s because they never have any fun.

You’ve probably heard this as many times as I have, so I’m sorry for the refresher, but I believe by this premise they are referring to the ordeal many of us Americans (and probably non-Americans, but who am I to say? Or care?) face wherein we cannot keep ourselves from awaiting the next big life-change, even and especially when the “next big life-change” is actively upon us. This trap is an easy one to trip and has been snapping our little rodent necks for many a generation.

We were poor across the globe any number of centuries ago, but poverty as we knew it would cease once we landed in the New World, where the streets are paved with gold and the Frenchette kaiju waved even the feeblest in with her flaming fist. Then we were poor in the New World, but poverty as we knew it would cease once we struck a glimmering vein, such as employment by a company name known from the champagne-sipping mansion-dwellers on the high hills to the sloven laborers of penniless third-world-adjacent slums. Then we were poor on the factory floor, but poverty as we knew it would cease once we stockpiled enough papercoin to venture into the westward frontier, where the law was our own and the land was ripe with God’s gracious fruits for our merciless reaping. Then we were poor in the westward frontier.

My baseless and unqualified mouth says that the psychiatrists and poets and TikTok preachers are right in saying it is not a wise thing, awaiting better days. A teary-eyed Andy Bernard, played by Ed Helms in America’s own The Office, once said, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good ol’ days before you’ve actually left them.” And in my quoting such media, I would make two things clear: the first is that I have never seen a full episode of The Office, nor would I care to, but I can appreciate its social prominence as it is relentlessly served to me in 60 second portraits on Instagram Reels, and the second is that he is wrong. You can know when you are in the good ol’ days, because you are drowning in them as you are in the air.

Two years ago I lived in Los Angeles, alone, blinds vampirically drawn and almost constantly picking the floor of maggots that wriggled their larval way inside through the gap in the baseboard moulding of the crumbling wall my cheap landlords planted their thrice-daily watered garden against. I made as much money as vinegar catches flies and had even fewer friends. Today, however, I miss it. A state I believed to be transient is now one of my good ol’ days.

Also today, right now, ahora, jetzt, inaianei, зараз, अब, other words for “now” that Google Translate may have gotten wrong, I am in one of those transient states. The good times are behind me and the good times are ahead of me but this stretch of time I am knowingly stuck in is truly, truly transient. I hung a blank calendar on the wall and have had little to benefit from, save a surplus of time. In fact, my having time to write this at all is proof enough, I believe.

I left LA (I couldn’t afford the cheapest studio in town anymore) and am on my way to NYC (you’d think I’d learn), with a two week sabbatical in the company of my two dear life-givers in O-H-I-O (go Bucks!). Two weeks- mitosis, mitosis, mitosis– become four months. I landed a (pretty good, not to brag) job in upstate New York but, until that starts, I am to remain in O-H-I-O (go Bucks!) doing, you guessed it, nothing. Unless you count waiting as doing something. Or writing. Or spending quality time with my family. You know, nothing.

I took this rent-less, bill-less, responsibility-less, 117 (one-hundred and seventeen!) day state of transience to do something I’ve struggled to attain for several years. I still couldn’t get it in Ohio (go Bucks!) due to my age but in a shockingly left-leaning turn of events, nearby Indiana agreed to perform a genital mutilation on little old me, a vasectomy. My apologies to America for contributing negatively to our declining population rate, and my you’re welcomes to China for statistically improving the size of your future army in proportion to ours. 铸牢中华民族共同体意识，促进各民族共同团结奋斗、共同繁荣发展!

Vasectomy recovery was initially slow but my doctor— my dear, trusted doctor— told me, “Some guys– er, uh, some people who get vasectomies are back to work in two or three days!” She also told me the procedure would be quick and painless, the easiest thing in the world, “We could do this in your living room,” she said. “Rest for at least 1 day. You should recover completely in less than a week,” she also said. These claims are– I cautiously do not say lies– to be taken with a grain of salt.

“Scorching my seared balls with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again,” Edgar Allen Poe would have said had he suffered a problematic vasectomy rather than a broken heart.

Sharp pains, dull pains, aching pains, tender pains, period pains in my balls and my testicles and my nuts and my jewels y mi huevos. My vas deferens felt like there’d been thumbtacks plugged in all four open ends rather than cauterization. I draw similarities between these debilitating sensations and a short-lived game I played with a dog’s shock collar once in high school, only I couldn’t switch my nerves off the same way I could the collar. The only part of my loin left unperturbed was the incision site itself, which gave me the sole solace of cutting down every charlatan dunce unfortunate enough to attempt kindness in the inevitable form of, “Maybe it’s an infection.” Those halfwits will think twice next time they try to offer much needed solutions.

So entirely alone, experiencing the opposite of what the ‘What To Expect’ sheet given to me by my surgeon said I should be experiencing, I attempted to reach out to some friends. They all had half-cocked excuses like, “It’s 11 in the morning on a weekday, of course I can’t come over to watch Special Agent Oso with you. Unlike you, I actually have a job and also that’s a kids show, and not even one of the good ones. Why don’t you go find some part-time work to save up the money you desperately need?” Frankly, it was disheartening. You can scroll through your entire list of contacts no more than three times before you start wondering if you’re as unlikable as not one, not two, not three, not four, but five of your past bosses have said you are.

There are only so many Reddit threads about post-vasectomy pain and they don’t really stand much in the way of pep talks. Most posts are by men who have never fully recovered one year, two years, five, ten, forty years down the line. I imagined my balls hurting at fifty-one years of age as well as every day pro and preceding. It was a good thing for me to think about every day all the time, especially after reading descriptions of people’s pain as if they’d just pulled a Black Mirror S4E6 on me.

With a looping cycle of ice packs timed to an atomic clock on my groin and through a mouthful of Ibuprofen, I called the clinic I was treated at but I couldn’t talk directly to them, of course, so I spoke to a regional call center representative who promised to call the clinic’s representative to ask them to call their nurse practitioner to ask her to call the doctor to ask her to call me. Imagine how it went.

Luckily there is a wide variety of urologists in my area, so I picked my favorite insurance accepter and was promptly turned away. I shrugged and dialed the second one down, and then the third, and I think I’ve written too many predictable lists in this piece already. Long story short, I stopped at sixteen. You see, no doctor will see you about a procedure that was performed by another doctor. It’s a precaution in the case of any sort of legal trouble, as is clearly reflected in the oft forgotten revision of the Hippocrates’ immortal oath:

“...I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems avoiding all that noise no matter what, if I am to care adequately for the sick make hella Benjamins...”

But on top of the second worst pain I can recall ever knowing (the worst was one remarkably hostile ear infection, but that’s not as funny of a story), was an issue that, to the time of writing this, I cannot decide on the severity of. Even now, nearly a month following the procedure, after an emergency room visit resulting in an fruitless ultrasound and two more painkiller prescriptions, after one single underwhelming and unrepeatable call from my surgeon (who says the pain I’m feeling is “unlikely”), I cannot point definitely to where on the scale of importance I’d place the impact this vasectomy has had on my orgasms.

To those of you not equipped with a functioning penis, or at least not my functioning penis, which I suspect will be many of you, I offer a brief and semi-invasive introduction to orgasmic sensation. It is felt, in my experience, in the penis (this part is the most sensitive during the majority of external sexual stimulation, particularly the tip (or glans, for the nerds out there) but feels the least pleasure during the actual moment of orgasm), in the testicles ((or balls, for the hip-cats out there) this part feels roughly equal pleasure during external sexual stimulation and during orgasm), and in the gut ((or prostate, for the average people out there) this part is where the ‘full body feeling’ stems from, I think). Obviously there are glute and leg and ab things going on, not to mention that dastardly brain o’ mine, but as far as life specific to the sex organ goes, this is the skinny.

Now let me get a little bit more specific. What I mean by saying there’s an orgasmic sensation in my testicles, I really mean in the sides of my testicles, where the actual testicle inside the sac attaches to everything else. In hindsight, an anatomically knowledged person might recognize the listed part as the vas deferens. That person would be right. I can no longer feel orgasms in my balls, via vas deferens.

At this point you must be thinking about how hopelessly stupid I must be for thinking that the severance of my vas deferens would not result in their ceasing to work, since that is the one and only purpose of a vasectomy, and to that I rebuke you and my critical self-hatred. You need only look past my admittedly neanderthalic brow to see that I am no hairless ape lacking the capacity to critically think, but am actually a hairless ape that made the rookie mistake of taking dozens of accredited and trustworthy hubs of relevant medicine at their word, e.g.:

Rest assured, in virtually every case, you will have normal orgasms after a vasectomy. 

-Advanced Urology Institute

A vasectomy should not change the overall sensation of an orgasm.

-Urology of Greater Atlanta

The sensation of ejaculation during an orgasm shouldn’t feel any different at all. 

-Healthline

The damoclean discomfort is gradually turning into a damoclean anti-climax, in every sense of the word. My next big life-change might be even worse than my last big life-change. And what can I do about it? If the pain really does go away, should I not just be grateful to be free of a constant inhibitor? Do I really need to burden myself and others over one-third of my past orgasms? Everything else feels just fine (really good, actually, but no better than before), so why should a portion of pleasure bother me? Would I rather have slightly weaker orgasms or an unwanted child? Would the ‘96 Bulls rather have thousands of above-average Jordans for free or one paraplegic Jordan for so much more money than they can afford? Probably neither– I’ve heard they were quite fond of Mike as they had him– but I can’t be sure because I don’t really like basketball. And I don’t think the Chicago Bulls ought to be entertaining such ableist hypotheticals.

But who am I to complain? People have terminal cancer and crumbling vertebrae, glass bones and paper skin, and I have the audacity to panic over my balls? I know those same Tumblr essayists and psychologists say not to compare your experience to someone else’s. “Just because it doesn’t hurt as much doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” That is very good and true advice, but come on. Balls? Say it in a Cartman voice. Balls. Doesn’t quite stack up to an iron lung.

And, exhaustingly, there are the ‘I told you so’ slanderers that would jump on me like paparazzi on a pop star on their way into rehab, at perhaps their lifetime most vulnerable, ready to ask me if I regret getting a vasectomy at 21 years old. And I’m not sure I can concisely say (anything, given the length of this essay, but also) that I don’t know if I regret it yet, and I don’t suppose I will for at least a few months more, but if regret does settle in it will have nothing to do with my desire to father a leeching progeny but everything to do with A) my lifetime of chronic pain, B) my weakened orgasms, or C) both.

That harbinger of a question unfailingly beckons the apocalyptic discussion of a vasectomy reversal. They are possible, and there are whispers in many of the Reddit threads, rumors of a wishful world, where men are said to have gotten reversals that have eliminated the pain and revitalized sensation. It is to be noted though, that reversals are offensively expensive (and insurance will almost certainly not cover them, blaming you for “changing your mind,” despite that reasoning’s irrelevance in my case) and not always successful. The threads all mention that fact and a Google search will laser etch into your inquisitive mind the same thing, that they are not always successful.

Now, if you wish to know what “successful” means, get in line. Does a successful reversal result in fertility? Because I’ve not regained an interest in insemination. Or does it mean eliminated pain and a return of sensation? That I do have an interest in, but I try not to let myself dream of that Goldilocks zone too much. It comes down to the fact that voluntary sterilization is an ethical question to everybody who has the know-how, so no expertly worded Google search will give a satisfactory answer. Unless I beat it out of a urologist, I will never know, and unless a urologist agrees to see me, I will never speak to a urologist. And I’d sooner be able to place in a triathlon, even in my current state, than get my original surgeon on the phone. It is possible that my balls will be numb during orgasm and aching at all other times until the day I die.

The lack of sensation might not really be that big of a deal though. I think it is sometimes, but those instances are usually contained to existential crises, the time I spent writing this, and the 10 second duration of an orgasm at which time my balls feel about as good as my fingernails. I think about the pain more often, because I feel it more often. I feel it now.

I think about things when I feel it too. I think about how my livelihood hinges on one elective surgery and my doctor’s incomplete precautionary list. I think about how stupid it would be to identify as a disabled person not over paralyzation or stroke side effects or deteriorating vision, but because of some lowbrow, toilet humor joke of a body part. I think about whether or not this transient state may be one of Andy’s “good ol’ days” in disguise, or if this is potentially my first true transient state.

My vas deferens throw a javelin up my spinal cord and I wince. I go down the stairs a little too quickly and my testicles feel like they’ve received a legal but frowned upon UFC kick. I lean against the low bathroom sink to brush my teeth and double over in pain.

I think about what I can’t do right now. What I may no longer be able to do at all. What I may have lost indefinitely. I used to work out. I used to carry my nephew around on my shoulders. I used to run with my dog.

I wonder if I can run at all anymore. Maybe that’s my next big life-change.