After your vasectomy, and even beforehand, you’ll have lots of questions. While I try to answer as many of those as I can, I know that some questions come up while patients are away from an in-office visit. For this reason, I usually send them home with materials to help quell concerns and help them remember how to take care of themselves properly post-vasectomy.
Extensive research has been done to determine if performance of a vasectomy causes any diseases in the future. Despite what you might read, Vasectomy is NOT a risk factor for the following conditions: Prostate cancer, Coronary heart disease, Stroke, High blood pressure, Dementia or Testicular cancer.
Here are the instructions I usually send home:
DAY 1 – DAY OF VASECTOMY
Go and spend most of the day lying on the couch or bed with one or two pillows underneath your head. Do not get in an “easy chair or Lazy boy type chair”. They will make the swelling worse. Take your pants and underwear off and place a washcloth on the scrotum and place a zip-lock bag of ice on top of the washcloth. Use the ice in “15 minutes on, 15 minutes off” intervals as long as you are lying down. You can go from the couch to the bed to the bathroom and dining room all day long, but nowhere else. Take pain medicine as needed. But remember: no Advil, Ibuprofen, Aleve or aspirin-containing products for at least 3 days to ensure there is no bleeding. If the Band-Aid falls off the day of the procedure, replace with a new one. There are no sutures to remove. Mild swelling is to be expected. That night, when you go to sleep, you don’t need to continue with the ice pack intervals.
DAY 2 – THE NEXT DAY
You can shower, walk around with a pen and pad to plan for some projects the following weekend and promptly go lay back down on the couch and forget them. You need to spend at least 50% of the day lying around. You can use the ice if you want, but it is not necessary. If the Band-Aid did not fall off in the shower, leave it on and remove the following day.
DAY 3 – TWO DAYS AFTER
You can drive around and piddle a bit around the house, but no heavy lifting or strenuous exercise. I would spend at least some of the day lying around on the couch or bed to reduce the swelling.
DAY 4 & THE REST OF THE WEEK
Back to work you go but try to get help with anything that really looks heavy or very strenuous. Avoid strenuous workouts at the gym for 10 days.
FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
Most guys have the most discomfort in the middle of the week following the vasectomy when they have resumed their normal “non strenuous activities”. You can resume intercourse in about a week. Even so, continue to use some form of contraception until we give the “greenlight” for unprotected intercourse.
No followup scheduled appointment will be made for you and we will give instructions for collecting a semen analysis at a later date. There are millions of sperm stored in the prostate and seminal vesicles past the point of the vasectomy. You need to ejaculate about 10 -15 times to clear all of these out. After you have ejaculated about 15 times over the next several weeks or months, ejaculate once in the cup and take it to a hospital. You don’t have to worry about getting the specimen in the lab in less than 3 hours. Wait about 3 days and call our office to get the report. Then collect another specimen in two weeks or longer and call our office for the report. If the first specimen has sperm still present, then you need to ejaculate about 5 more times and then collect another specimen to submit to the lab for analysis. You need 2 specimens in a row with no sperm before you can resume unprotected intercourse. Even with two consecutive negative semen analysis, there is still a 1 in 2000 chance of pregnancy but almost always occurs in the first 6 months.
You’ll be sent home the day of the vasectomy with a bag that include the specimen containers and the telephone #’s for the local labs. You should call the lab before you bring the specimen to make sure you bring it in during appropriate hours.
REMEMBER: BE QUIET, VERY QUIET THIS WEEKEND. A SCROTUM THE SIZE OF A GRAPEFRUIT IS NOT WORTH THE RISK OF PURSUING “THAT PROJECT” IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS.