PVPS is known to be real, but there are very few studies on it. Nobody really knows the incidence, there is no way to predict who will get it, and all of the treatment options suck. Reversal is the best, but is very expensive and often doesn't work.
The reversal cost me ~$14k out of pocket. It's often not covered by insurance because it is considered elective.
I wish I had more to offer than an anecdote. There's some forums out there of people who got it much worse than me.
A footnote I forgot to add: the pain was only in my left testicle, while the right felt fine. This underlines the unpredictability of PVPS.
To say this without even paying lip-service to the well-known and common negative side effects strikes me as incredibly disingenuous.
The few guys I've known well enough over the years to discuss such matters who had lived with vasectomies long enough all complained of testicular pain, granulomas forming, etc.
One would so consistently walk bull-legged from the pain into our shared office I basically knew whenever he got stoned with his wife the previous weekend. He wasted numerous days on doctor visits to get it checked out and see if he had developed testicular cancer, since granulomas are easily conflated with tumors, especially when the area's too tender/painful to really probe yourself.
Living with a vasectomy is not all sunshine and roses.
And I say this as someone who feels strongly about the planet being overrun by far too many homo sapiens.
And of the several guys I know who had lived with vasectomies for a long time, none of them experienced any sort of long-term discomfort at all.
We have dueling anecdata here. I have not seen any information, in data or anecdotes, that would make me even a little nervous about getting a vasectomy.
However, there is risk with literally all surgical procedures, no matter how minor. Different people have different risk tolerances, and I am not diminishing your own personal risk assessment.
You're right, it's not like what my anecdata describes is common/confirmed by the data enough to have a medical term describing it with its own wikipedia page or anything...
I'm saying that it appears to me that the risk is very small. Whether or not it's small enough to be under your threshold of acceptable risk is an individual matter. I am not saying that people who decide it's too risky are being foolish. That's a personal decision that there is no objective right or wrong answer to.
It is a standard procedure reimbursed by social security.
Some even say they've been fine for quite a bit of time and then suddenly the pain starts.
Which in total makes me absolutely NOT want a vasectomy even though I have zero desire to reproduce.
Because it does feel plausible that it can cause trouble to lock something up in the body which is meant to be released once in a while.
I hope some day men too will have real and reliable (condoms fail a lot) self-determination in terms of reproduction, not only "suffer abstinence your whole life or risk getting financially gutted for decades."
Period tracking is incredibly reliable. People will tell you that women will lie about when they have their periods. However, if you can't trust a woman to tell you when she's menstruating, then that's perhaps a sign that you're not ready for sexual conduct with that woman.
The failure rate of that is in the double digits percentage AFAIK !?
Besides, as long as you are still fertile and relying upon someone else not being fertile that is not self-determination. Men can also be victims of violence.
And as soon as multiple $100k in potential alimony payment (raising a kid for 18 years costs that much!) get involved some (not all!) people will lie to your face as much as humanly possible.
I know this isn't the best contraception but I live in a country where I have access to abortion and "tomorrow" pills.
Actually do you rememeber the twitter thread when someone took apart one of those test (a pregnancy test, I assume they're alike) and then you realised it's basically a small camera doing the work of your eyes on a very cheap paper test ? https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301707401024827392
I don't want to use one or two tests like that a month, it would be too much waste. Good news is I suppose is I should be able to get my hand on a paper tests.
Fertility awareness requires a great deal of mutual trust, and a great deal of understanding of one's body. It is not 100% reliable (although the media would have you believe this method is only for religious zealots and the irresponsible, which is very much not true) -- but it's a lot less complicated than invasive surgery.
Something changed for me, down there, after the procedure. My right testicle, in particular, is a lot more sensitive than it used to be. And there is the occasional pain. When that happens I feel around down there and the "tubes" (not sure of the anatomical terminology) feel like they're quite swollen.
Did it destroy me? Absolutely not. Can I live with it? Yes. Do I regret having the procedure? No.
But there is clearly a middle of the road scenario here. I'm never in excruciating pain. I've never needed to take pain killers for it. But every once in a while there is a mild throbbing, similar to having a mild headache and it goes away after a while. My family doctor told me that it would go away after a while but it's been 5 years since I had the procedure and it persists.
Something else that I'll say. I had children way too young. My wife and I were high school sweethearts and we got pregnant in our senior year. I love my daughters to death but fatherhood was INSANELY difficult for me. I'm pretty sure that I have Asperger syndrome and this comes with extreme noise sensitivity, freaking out when I get interrupted by anything etc. I really wish that I had understood this about myself when I was 19 years-old because I'm positive that we could have found ways to give our daughters a much easier childhood. Nevertheless, I was absolutely convinced in my 20s that I never should have had kids and that I would never want more.
Then I hit my mid to late 30s, became financially successful, way more comfortable with who and what I am as a person and suddenly felt like NOW was the time to have kids and I kind of wanted to give it another go.
People change, and while vasectomies are reversible, the advise is to consider them a permanent solution.
Just information. Everyone needs to make this extremely personal decision for themselves.
On the upside…you’ll have a long life together with your children (and maybe grandchildren), at an age when you are young enough to really enjoy it. I know people who waited a long time to have kids, and then by the time their kids were adults, they were in their mid-late sixties. They end up needing care as they age when their children are young, relatively poor, and with young children of their own…which can make it hard to care for their now-elderly parents.
Don't be cheap and get some that are actually your size.
Or to put it in more visual words:
If you had $ 200 000 in cash (that's the cost of a kid), would you secure it against theft with a 0.07 mm piece of plastic?
It's insane that this is expected of men.
Those two moving bodies are plenty squishy, and there's a lot of suspension absorbing forces there. There's also lubricant.
- which we don't even have to discuss, because there is statistics about this, and their failure rate is quite high, as said between 2% and 12% (I suppose it's a range because usage errors and quality vary).
Google "Pearl index".
how do you figure?