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I wonder who managed to guess the topic of this post from the picture? I'm willing to bet that most of the Silver Blogger community.. but perhaps not the general readers who are below a certain age!

... anyway, there comes a point in life when you probably have had enough kids... and the time comes for a more permanent solution. Now, throughout most of our time together, my wife has been on the pill... and that is for all the time except for when we were actively trying to have kids. Now that that period of our lives is done, it is highly unlikely that we will be wanting to have more children.

Now, my wife has been wanting to get off the pill for some time now... and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to do that. She doesn't have serious side-effects from the pill, but there have been moments when we have been wondering if it has been doing something that was a little less desired. Besides, there is always the idea that if you don't need to be taking anything... then you probably shouldn't. Now that we know that we don't really want more children, we thought that it would be a good opportunity for me to get a vasectomy and for her to get off the pill.

So, we were a bit delayed due to the chaos of moving to the other side of the planet... and we were holding off doing it until we were here and covered under the Australian Medicare health system. But now that things are a bit more settled (well... it is still chaos, but we have a permanent address sort of chaos...), we have decided to just go straight ahead with it.

Today, I had my appointment with the doctor who will be performing the procedure. The first appointment is a bit of a get to know you sort of thing... you know, when you are going to have someone fondle your balls and then cut something on the inside, it is sort of courteous to have a little chat first.

Plus, during the chat, they can check up on any possible health problems and inform you about the things that they are about to do to you before asking you to take your pants and undies off so they can grope around.

Well... it appears that I passed the initial chat interview and the grope test... and so, I'm scheduled for a minor procedure to make me sterile next week! It was nice to talk to the doctor to see how it all worked... I have to probably think that I was one of the more nerdily (or annoyingly) curious about what was going to happen and how things worked generally. That's just me... I like learning about new things... even if I am a bit squeamish about all of this. I know nothing about how it works, and it was interesting to learn about how it all works down there!

He was telling me about how they used to tie up both ends of the sperm tubes when it was all first developed... but that these days, they keep the end that produces sperm open... apparently, it caused quite a lot of bad side-effects when you tied up that bit and it all backed up through to the testes. I could imagine that 10 million sperm per day being produced and having nowhere to go would lead to some serious pressure! Anyway, now, they just discharge into the open body and are reabsorbed.

The doctor told me that this is a pretty common and simple procedure these days... of course, these things always have a risk, but of all the possible options, it is the one that with the least risk and chance of unwanted side-effects. So, that makes it the only logical choice!

I'm not supposed to travel for a few days afterwards... just in case of complications, but otherwise, it is a procedure that just takes twenty minutes under local anaesthetic. Walk in, and walk out... It sounds much easier than getting my wisdom teeth pulled! However, it will take about three months to take a sperm sample to be sure that I'm going to be shooting blanks!

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