Hey guys, looking for an excuse to stay home all day and watch the NCAA basketball tournaments?
Here’s an idea: more and more men are scheduling vasectomies around March Madness season, which lets them follow their brackets (doctor’s orders!) while recovering from getting snipped.
Slam. Dunk.
“There’s actually a huge uptick during March Madness,” said Puneet Masson, director of male fertility care and an assistant professor of urology at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. “I would say I see triple the numbers,” he said, adding that patients book their hoops-centered procedures months in advance. “We call it Vas Madness.”
It’s a trend, no matter what you call it.
The Cleveland Clinic said it logged a 10-percent increase in vasectomies before the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament between 2014 and 2016, according to Men’s Health magazine.
“A few years ago, I wiped my schedule and did 10 (vasectomies) one day and 12 the next,”
Dr. Joseph Alukal, the director of male reproductive health and clinical associate professor of urology at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, told The Washington Post.
Although the procedure — which about a half a million men in the U.S. undergo annually — is minimally invasive and only takes about 15 minutes to perform, there’s typically a two-day period guys need to keep their balls, well, in the air.
“Typically, men should take it easy on the couch,” said Dr. Edmund Sabanegh, department chair of urology at the Cleveland Clinic. “They will need to apply an ice bag for about six hours, on and off. For a short time, they should not do anything strenuous.”
Along with the frozen peas, be sure to add SpermCheck, an over-the-counter male fertility test, to your post-procedure shopping list. The easy-to-use kit takes the guessing out of whether the vasectomy has kicked in (it usually takes about three months before any lingering sperm have been flushed out) so you can ditch birth control altogether.
There’s swag in that vasectomy bag.
Still need some convincing that a vasectomy is right for you? Consider this: the procedure is pretty effective — only about 1 percent of vasectomies fail — and your sex life just might improve.
And then there’s this: hopping on the March Madness trend, doctors’ offices across the country are offering all sorts of fun incentives to help convince dudes to get snipped around the NCAA tournaments.
Urology of Central PA is more than happy to give guys an excuse to put their feet up — guilt free — and watch college hoops “with the full support, even the sympathy, of those around you,” according to their website. The group is promoting Snip City, which offers 24 lucky guys the opportunity to nab “premium tickets” to have their vasectomies performed the day before the tournaments begin (#timing). According to their radio ad, research shows 4 out of 5 guys want to schedule their procedures around a major sports event, and encourages men to “lower (their) seed for the tournament.”
Guys not only win permanent sterility, but walk away with an “Official Recovery Kit,” including a bag of frozen peas, doctor’s note requiring you to sit on the couch and watch basketball, and a t-shirt (making us wonder if it reads: I Got a Vasectomy and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt?).
Not to be outdone, guys who sign up for vasectomies during March Madness at the Idaho Urologic Institute go home with a Vas Survival Kit including everything from a coupon for a two-topping Domino’s Pizza to a bag of nuts.
Earlier this month, the Charleston Area Medical Center gave away a free vasectomy to the winner of their “Click. Snip. Dunk.” contest, which got over 800 shares and 189 comments when the group promoted the event on Facebook.
NOVA Urology offers “hassle-free” vasectomies during March Madness season, which include same-day evaluations and sterilization all while watching the games on TV during the procedure. “You may not get to see two commercials before we are done,” the website warns, as the procedure is so quick. Patients can recover over beer and pretzels in a modern and relaxed setting, watching the NCAA game of their choice.
Does the NCAA tournament seem just a little too soon for you to commit to getting snipped? Never fear.
“It’s not just March Madness, there’s the Masters as well,” Dr. Ryan Berglund, a urologist in the Glickman urological and Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic, told the Daily Mail Online. “We also see an increase when there’s a big video game release.”
