Welcome to my first blog about vasectomy side effects. I know, you thought there weren't any side effects, right? You thought a vasectomy is no big deal; everyone else in the office has had one; your wife might even be pressuring you to get one. Well, there is a little dirty secret that nobody talks about when it comes to vasectomies.
The secret is called Post Vasectomy Pain Syndrome or PVPS for short. It usually takes on two forms.
1. Varying degrees of nerve pain - from debilitating to inconvenient.
2. Epididymitis (epi-did-i-my-tus). I know, that's a mouth full.
I will start by telling you my story. I had a vasectomy 5.5 years ago. Six months later, I had swelling in my scrotum which was not very comfortable. After a scrotal ultrasound - yep, I didn't know they could do that either - I was diagnosed with epididymitis. No big deal my uro doc told me, just take some antibiotics and a steroid dose pack and I should be ship shape in no time. Then every 6 months, this pattern would repeat.
It turns out, somewhere between 7-15% of all men who have a vasectomy end up with some sort of pain syndrome. That's 1 out of every 10 guys that have a vasectomy. Lucky me I guess.
Okay, now I've had a reversal to see if that will fix my problem. Now since the reversal, I have a nerve pain that feels like a dull ache on the right side of my scrotum. I also have a flash of pain that hits me out of the blue in various places between my belly button and groin. I would rate it a 7 on a 1-10 pain scale where 10 is the most intolerant pain you could imagine.
So basically, there is no simple fix to this problem. Once you have it, you have it. Sometimes the surgical treatments work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they make it worse. Sometimes leaving it alone and treating it conservatively it the right thing and sometimes it's the wrong thing.
This is a very insidious syndrome because it is so poorly understood. Most urologists who perform vasectomies never experience patients with this problem.
Because vasectomies are such a big business, very little information gets out about this syndrome, but believe me, it's very real. I joined a support group a couple of weeks ago and now I am trying to do my part to get the word out, about what many of us suffer from. Post vasectomy pain syndrome can be just as debilitating as any other disease you can think of. It may not cause death, but I'm certain many men would have preferred it.
Please visit the forum's link if you want to get real information about this painful phenomena. I will invite others to post their stories here as well as provide information about this dreaded problem.
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