Roger Collier

We stepped into the Jetta, her behind the wheel, me in the passenger's seat. A few minutes later, we turned onto the Queensway. I glanced at the dashboard clock: 9:45 a.m. An hour until my appointment.

I pulled a pill bottle from my pocket and opened it. Inside, there was just one pill. A Valium. I popped it in my mouth and took a swig of water. Leaning back, I tried to relax. Of course, it's tough for a man to relax when he's a mere hour away from having someone poke a hole in his scrotum.

It helped that this someone was a doctor, a good doctor, who had opened (and closed) thousands of holes in thousands of scrotums. But still. How can any man not be a little nervous on the way to his vasectomy? Unless, that is, you're the type who enjoys having surgery on your wedding vegetables.

I knew a vasectomy was a routine procedure. Quick. Relatively painless. Relatively safe. Still, there were risks, however slight. And it didn't help that the first person I spoke to about my impending sterility was still experiencing, a year after his vasectomy, frequent bouts of intense pain in his undercarriage.

A few Internet searches after that conversation, I became acquainted with an unpleasant malady known as post-vasectomy pain syndrome. Its primary symptom is debilitating testicular pain that last for years or, in some cases, forever.

Kevin Hauber, who runs the website www.dontfixit.org, began his "nightmare of chronic pain" after his vasectomy in 1999. He writes: "Nineteen surgeries and nerve blocks, 197 medications and other substances, and dozens (of ) therapies that I have pursued in the interim have not resolved the pain I experience on a daily basis." Great. Was there a pill I could take to erase that sentence from my memory?

I realized that medical horror stories abound on the Internet. People who have positive medical experiences carry on with their lives, happily and quietly. People who have negative experiences tend to make noise -- and write words, words like "ruptured" and "testicles," which should never appear together.

But anecdotes, as researchers say, aren't evidence. According to my doctor's website, only one in 10,000 neutered men develop post-vasectomy pain syndrome. Though my rational self took comfort in that statistic, my emotional self focused on my friend's inflamed scrotum (speaking of sentences that shouldn't exist).

Stories resonate more than statistics, and the only story I had heard about vasectomies was a bad one. So I asked other guys -- family members, friends -- about their vasectomies. Their stories, thank goodness, were positive. My worries abated. My rational self claimed victory. My baby-making days (yield to date: two) were numbered.

It took 45 minutes to get to the doctor's office the day of my vasectomy. Shortly after arriving, I was lying on my back, pants around ankles, eyes toward ceiling. I felt several faint pops down under ( jet-injection anesthesia, no needle, thank you medical technology) and resisted the urge to peek as the doctor got to work.

"How old are the oldest guys you've done this to?" I asked

"In their 70s," he said. "New marriages?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "to much younger women."

I admire physicians, but I don't envy them. I could never do a job that requires frequent (even occasional) contact with other people's genitals. Once, during dinner at our house, a friend of my wife who was completing her medical residency sighed and said she had seen far too many penises that day. I have yet to hear a fellow journalist make that complaint.

"That's it. We're done," the doctor said, barely 10 minutes after he began.

I pulled up my pants and returned to the waiting room, hunched over, bow-legged, like an octogenarian with a beach ball between his knees. "Why are you walking like that?" my wife asked. "The guy who came out before you wasn't walking like that."

I didn't know why I was walking funny. I think I was mimicking a post-vasectomy hobble I had seen on a sitcom. But I wasn't in pain, so I straightened up and walked with my usual gait to the car.

On the ride home, I remembered that my friend had told me his scrotal affliction hadn't begun until months after his vasectomy. I took the pill bottle out of my pocket and shook it. Still empty. Crap.