How Kevin Dawson faced up to many men's greatest fear: going for the snip
In most other respects it was an average Friday. As lunchtime approached in my south Dublin office, I rounded off a few quick meetings, leafed through the last of the morning post, got a faxed message away and checked my e-mails one more time. Then I drove down to Donnybrook village and exposed my genitalia to a woman I had never met before.
It wasn't quite as inappropriate as it sounds. After 14 years of happy parenting I had opted to follow many of my friends and colleagues and go for the snip. It had taken me only 10 years to turn intention into action. In April 1994, as our daughter emerged safely by Caesarean section in the Rotunda, to join our then three-year-old son, we knew our family was complete. My wife and I were in our mid- to late 30s, and we didn't fancy going through it all again. Just two, as the phrase had it, would do.
As our daughter was whisked away, it dawned on me that the surgeons had everything in place for the vasectomy that our happy circumstances seemed to call for: the slab, the blades and anaesthetics, the fully prepped team. "What about it, lads? We'll be done in minutes," I cheerfully suggested. They declined. The moment passed.
The issue didn't pass, of course, and soon the baby's early infancy was over and something like normal amorous activity resumed amid the wasteland of nappies and bottles and red-eyed exhaustion. But we knew decision time had come. It's unavoidable if, as a couple, you're unsuited to the Pill and unenamoured by some of the alternatives, such as the condom.
Suburban passion - even in south Dublin - may not always be as hot as in Hollywood. But when have you ever seen James Bond spoil the moment by fumbling for the foil packet in the sock drawer? How many couples, just as a
cosy bedtime snuggle starts to show promise, have seen the passion evaporate during the search among the receipts, trouser buttons
and charter-flight earphones? A tumbler of
water knocked over. A bedside light flicked
on.
Bond doesn't have to put up with it. Why would anyone in their right mind? We finally presented ourselves to our GP, to initiate the process, to talk it through in a mature, shared and candid way. I was ready for it. Bring it on. Yet when the doctor pressed me about whether I was absolutely certain I wanted no more children, ever, the scale of the impending decision hit home.
Our children were aged 10 and six, healthy and happy and wonderful companions. We were now in our 40s and sure that we shouldn't, and wouldn't, "go again".
And yet: fatherhood had become such a fundamental part of my life that I found myself stopped in my tracks. It was as if cutting away a couple of tubes would in some indefinable way separate me from my children. From the still close and warm memories of them as babies. From the very business, I now realised, of being Dad.
Where now was the blithe spirit of the Rotunda delivery suite, after my daughter's safe birth, and my cheerful invitation to the surgical team to get on with it?
It didn't help that a surgeon friend who is usually gung-ho about operations spoke darkly about this procedure. He recounted tales of woe, painful infections, loss of pleasure, the end of the world as we knew it.
Other male friends took the opposite view. Most of my weekly indoor-soccer team mates had done the deed. They found it routine, no bother, glad to have done it. Bit of swelling for a few days, but you'll be grand.
In the end it was the memory of the Rotunda operating theatre that settled it. Both of our children had been born after Caesarean sections, the first an emergency after many hours of exhausting but unproductive labour. I'd seen my wife opened up and sewn up and sore, and then opened up again. If she could go through that in the name of parenting and partnership, what was to be feared from a few snips? Guided by her example, I booked myself in.
And so to Donnybrook at lunchtime, to see the doctor I'd met once before for the pre-op session, and his attentive nurse.
In went the little needles, then the big ones. It hurt, but only momentarily. The doctor worked and chatted a bit, down south. The nurse stayed up north and chatted some more while deftly assisting with swabs and instruments. For reasons I can't clearly remember, we spent most of the time talking about Dickie Rock.
Then, suddenly, it was over. Still only lunchtime. Shaken but not stirred, I drove home.
There were no complications, no aftershocks.
Children, life and fatherhood look and feel as good as always. And as for fumbling in a bedside drawer when the script calls for Bond-style smoothness? It's a whole new ball game.