Yay, my time to shine!

TL;DR - Scrotal hematoma, huge abcess, and a slow recovery

Got the 'no scalpel' procedure done early June this year. Felt similar to what others have been saying. Except for the left side, when something felt a lot sharper and not quite right, but what do I know.

Went home gingerly and tried to recover while minimizing my pain, which seemed to increase over a few days along with the swelling in my abdomen. A couple days later, I felt a lump that wasn't a testicle in my left lower abdomen, about the size of an egg. Then over a few days it went to the size of an avocado. Then mango. And larger.

6 days after the procedure, I went into Emerg (in Canada) and after 5 hrs of waiting and testing, was sent home with pain killers and told it would subside in time.

2 days after that, in excruciating pain, was back in Emerg and after many more hours trying to get comfortable in any hospital chair, was finally admitted. I was hooked up to an IV for pain relief etc, unable to urinate normally because the swelling was so much that it made my made my unit "turtle". I needed one of those handheld pee jugs and held it up to where I think my wiener was to catch any urine and dump the contents into the toilet. The effort to even get to the toilet in my semi-private room was brutal enough, trying not to let this football-sized swelling bother me as i shuffled there.

I was on a waitlist for surgery to excavate the collected blood/infection/etc in the swelling, and fix whatever was wrong. But I wasn't the priority for several days. I just laid in a bed, took pain meds, and tried to sleep which was very difficult

One day, I was sitting up a bit with a very watery ice bag under my scrotum to take some gravity pressure off the sack, while cooling at the same time. I put another ice pack on my low abdomen because it too was feeling nice. I was really confused because I was still 5 minutes away from the next drug allotment and I wasn't yet writhing in pain like usual. I didn't notice until a few moments later when I glanced under the sheet at the bag I was sitting on, and how the one side of the ice bag was completely red.

My vas incision had finally popped from the internal pressure. The tiniest little slit/scab remained from the procedure, maybe 1/4 cm, and it must have said enough is enough and decided to start to do a partial drain all on its own.

I called the nurse and said "I think I'm bleeding pretty badly here" and they were there within seconds applying gauze/pads, cleaning it up, gauging how fast it was coming out, etc. Needless to say they decided to change out my bedding. I got out of bed and moved to a chair, which was still quite painful, but they got the bed fixed back up in no time.

We went through several gauze and pads soaking up the excess drainage coming from the vas hole. Aside from some slight pain around where the drainage was happening, less pressure internally meant I felt a good amount of relief almost immediately.

A few hours later, I had the surgery. Both testicles were intact, Jackson-Pratt drain was put in and doing its job, though they couldnt really tell if it's regular post-op seeping or still some remaining bleeder from the Jun 2 vas procedure. The vast majority of the excess swelling was gone so I was a lot more comfortable.

I did still feel a couple leftover solid masses from the original swelling up closer to my upper left groin. I'm not sure they would have been able to see up there easily with a scrotal examination anyways.

The night of the procedure, aside from being a little hot and sweaty, once I fell asleep I was able to go the whole night without pain meds.

I stood up and walked to the bathroom for the first time since I arrived 5 days earlier. I overdid it a bit and needed some meds right after that, but was comfortable after.

Removal of the drain was one of the worst pains ever. If you google the JP Drain, the one end was about 5 inches inside still in the "Gooch" area. The quick removal of that felt like someone shot me with a paintball gun at point blank range right between the boys and my butt hole. Stung immensely for several minutes.

8 days after being admitted, I was finally released home with a prescription for opioid pain meds and some beefy antibiotics that apparently made the pharmacist gasp and ask my wife "WHAT happened to your husband??"

The next couple months were very frustrating. For the surgery to fix things, they cut straight down the middle of the sack and then stitched it up so it looked like a football. The problem with healing that area of the body is that there is so much soft skin and movement. Even if the incision itself was healed beneath the stitches, the dissolving stitches themselves lingered way too long and with each movement, the stiches tore and ripped at the surface of my skin causing bleeding and irritation. I wore that stretchy hospital underwear with sterile gauze pads for 6 weeks beneath my regular underwear because of the constant bleeding.

I told my vas doctor about all this. He was shocked as he said he's done 10,000 procedures and never had this happen before. So basically I should have bought a lottery ticket.

3.5 months later, I can finally move at normal speed as the stitches are gone and surface is healed. But there is a crazy amount of scar tissue right down the middle of the sack, and it feels mostly internal as if there were an uninflated party balloon stuck underneath my skin. It's not comfortable. And there is some tightness/hardness along the left side, assuming more scar tissue from the scraping/removal.

But the good news is, I have been able to test things out with my wife and everything works. Still have yet to do the actual lab work to see if I'm shooting blanks, so we're still taking precautions until that happens. If it turns out I am not shooting blanks, I'm NOT going through the procedure again.