It's a loaded word isn’t it, something we often spend most of our youth desperately avoiding, then perhaps part of our life chasing to varying lengths and extremes of intervention.
My periods have always been wacky, very heavy, and I also in the last five years have had PMT blow out to encompass a fortnight, something pretty unfair on those around me! In the last year it seems I’ve gone peri-menopausal, and that could last ages and just means periods are very irregular. Two in a month? Sure! Then a two month wait? Sure!
So figuring that there were no ‘safe’ times I could guarantee the Captain did the noble thing and sorted out a vasectomy. Done and dusted? No way.
After three months of postoperative tests he was down to 1% ‘motile’ sperm. So we thought we’d still play a bit safely (fill in the details you’re all wize enough too) but a whole night sans Finn (who was having a blast eating ice-cream and being generally spoilt at Na and Pa’s house) combined with a blissful sleep in, coffee in bed and some amorous snuggling and well, you know what happens.
So three weeks late I last night lay awake, breasts hot and hard, just knowing that irony with a big I might be playing a big trick on us. I hopped online (as you do when insomnia and a health concern kick in to keep you awake for five hours) and Lo- entire forums devoted to the multitude of women having unplanned pregnancies after their partners had vasectomies. Turns out that ‘sperm motility reactivation’ does not seem to be the one in five thousand chance listed in the vasectomy brochure, or if so then every one is online and talking about their shocking news.
I’m a feminist, know my rights and have always been willing to avail myself of them should the need arise, but it seemed (at 4am anyway) that anything that damned determined to find is way might need to be admired, even if not welcomed.
I spent the rest of then night organising space logistics in the home, and figuring out that Finn would be out of (expensive) day care before the zygote was in it, and that I still had some long service leave to add to maternity leave, and there was someone who could walk into my job (but might have needed poisoning to exit it!). Not excited, certainly not, but pragmatic and considering, yes.
All the while my breasts ached and tingled (the biggest surest sign of early pregnancy) and I pondered why I felt disloyal to Finn in thinking that the pregnancy could continue to its conclusion, a sibling for him and the whole crazy treadmill again for us.
I took a train to Newport, where an old-fashioned strip of red-brick shops hosts a chemist. I bought my package and came home and waited for wee, which can be slow when you’re clenched all over.
I just tested negative, having kept my eyes shut and refusing to look for much longer than the required three minutes.
Despite all the ‘planning’ I went through I know the vasectomy was the right choice, for when I saw that blue stripe flying solo I whooped with relief.
one little word, so loaded. It's like the shortest story ever told really.
and about the image? well someone told me recently that blogs are personal, no matter that the audience could be known, or not, or small, or big.
lily.
