Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'This is ridiculous!' Natalie said to him, also trying to suppress a laugh. 'We told your sec-
retary over the phone why we wanted to see you, why didn't she tell us then that you don't
perform vasectomies?'
Even the word seemed to wound him and he visibly winced. 'She doesn't need to know about
my affairs!' he replied huffily.
Has any man ever tried so hard to have a vasectomy? It wasn't, believe me, a masochistic
pursuit to have my giblets mucked about with; it became more a quest to see just how wound
up some French people could get. Granted, I could have chosen other ways to annoy the nat-
ives - walking into a restaurant and declaring oneself a teetotal vegetarian would have had
much the same effect and would hurt the French psyche just as easily.
It was another three months before we finally found a surgeon prepared to perform the oper-
ation and who, surprisingly, after all we'd been through so far, wasn't a back-street practition-
er reeking of gin, but a modern doctor who claimed that many of his colleagues were living
in the past. It's a simple procedure, he purred, you'll be in and out in a day, up and about in
another two days and within a week you'll be back to normal. This matched all the (very)
extensive research I'd done: a simple procedure, a bit of discomfort for a couple of days and
no complications. Well, almost no complications. A tiny percentage. You'd be very unlucky
to be in that tiny minority. Really. It never happens. Well, it hardly ever happens.
A week after the operation I was back in hospital with the doctor shaking his head, muttering
something about this never having happened to him before, like he was the one in pain. I had
developed a blood clot in my testicles and it stayed for a further month, time, apparently be-
ing the only healer. I don't want to linger on the details of this, but let me put it this way, you
only really get an idea of how limited the legroom is on an aeroplane when your genitals are
the size and colour of an aubergine. I'll leave it at that.
My point in all this is that the French are not only reluctant to neuter man or beast; they don't
seem to be very good at it either. And does it really have the desired effect anyway? Junior
is a gelding and about as wild and boisterous as any 'fully-equipped' horse; Toby is neutered
and hasn't calmed down at all, I have been emasculated but I was pretty docile beforehand
and not given to 'spraying' unless there was an overwhelming need to do so. The more I think
about it, the more convinced I am that poor Fox saw the writing on the wall and just took the
easier way out. And if you think that all the rigmarole is probably designed to put you off
having the operation in the first place then the post-operative care is there to remind you that
nobody, nobody likes the decision you made.
A few months after the operation, and once the aubergine had withered to prune-like propor-
tions, I was sent an appointment card to have tests to see if the vasectomy had worked or not.
Following the initial conversation with our local doctor I was surprised that these tests didn't
involve shacking me up with an aggressively fertile young woman to see if I made her preg-
nant or not; no, I had to visit a
laboratoire d'analyses
. Not my local
laboratoire d'analyses
