Sound of Cutting Off the Fishies

---

THERE WAS A TIME, during the first ten years of our marriage, when I possessed no shortage of
fishies, doing their fishy things.

Inasmuch as we already had four kids, two boys and two girls — one short of a basketball team — Roseana's OB/GYN warned us that instead of sending out another school of fish to break the tie, it would be prudent to cut off those fishies at their port of entry.

I don't mind telling you, I did not like the sound of cutting them off — I can’t express how much I did not like that sound! — but it was the only thing that made sense, under the circumstances.

And here were the circumstances:

Amanda, our youngest, was born on October 8th, 1977.

Her birth was not to come without consequences.

I’m no doctor, but I know that when a woman’s water breaks, amniotic fluid is all that’s supposed to be discharged. Both of us knew that it was not supposed to be attended by blood — a copious amount, I mean, a flood — of blood, splashing on the linoleum, and puddling at her feet.

We lived only two blocks from the hospital, so I drove her there. The staff immediately recognized the gravity of the situation and wheeled her into the delivery room.

I did not know, at that moment, how close the kids and I were to losing her — my young, beautiful wife of ten years — and their mother.

Surprisingly, Amanda’s birth went quite smoothly. We got to hold our squirming little bundle, and that night, we were given our complimentary steak dinner in a specially prepared room at the hospital. She stayed one additional day as a precaution, and on the following morning, mama and baby got to go home.

But it was during her pre-release exam when the doctor confessed to me that it had been “touch and go” whether she’d survive childbirth, so much blood she had lost. The doctor told my wife at that time that her childbearing years were behind her.

As far as enjoying the benefits — but without the product — of that singular activity that is central to all vibrant marriages, an IUD could not have been a permanent solution. I had the feeling it wasn’t even an option. So, toward the end of October, I made that dreaded phone call.

Noooo, I did not like the sound of cutting off those fishies.

*     *     *

At 10:00 AM sharp, Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Roseana and I entered the double door of the Zelko Urology Clinic. There had been no one in the parking lot, and the waiting room was also empty. The receptionist was apparently expecting us, because we didn’t even have a chance to sit down before she said, “Follow me, please.” 

Down the hallway, we passed three doors to our right; she opened the fourth, and we entered a roughly eight-by-ten enclosure.

“Doctor will be with you in a moment.” The door clicked behind her.

We sat side-by-side on the settee bench. I looked over at Roseana. She was looking right past me, and I followed her eyes to the plastic or plaster-cast model of male genitalia, on a stand near the door we had entered. Its parts were regaled in a circus of reds and yellows and midnight blues, and were enlarged unrealistically — at least I sincerely hoped — for purposes of demonstration.

I turned back to her, and judging from her expression, I might have been blushing.

“What do they know?” she said with a smile, but her expression had already morphed to reflect an abrupt change of subject — to one of concern. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, resolutely. “Really, we can turn around and leave.” She put her hand on my arm.

At that moment, a rapping on the door, followed by a click and the door swinging open — allowing nary a pause for us to invite the rapper in — gave entry to a curly-headed, bespectacled young man, wearing a white, short-sleeved smock, covering a casual, striped shirt. Black hair matted his arms all the way down to his wrists.

“Mrs. Squires.” He dipped his head toward Roseana, and leveled it, without smiling. “And Mr. Squires,” he said, extending his hand. “You’ve come for the Friday special.”

Roseana and I shared a look.

“I’m joking,” he said, and then he smiled. “My name is Doctor Zelko.” He rolled a round-cushioned stool in front of us and lowered himself onto it, leaning forward, staring at me in a most forlorn way.

I was just about to say something, though I had no idea what, when he broke through his self-induced silence with, “You’re worried … no?”

“Well …” I said, “I guess a little.”

“Ah, yes. That’s natural. But I want you to know it’s a very simple procedure. I’ve done it, what? — oh, gosh-amighty — two, three times! No, no, just joking. I’ve done it hundreds on hundreds of times. Never lost a patient.”

He waited, I think for us to smile. “But here, let me show you.”

He swiveled around in his chair so his back was to us, and that left me time to glance at Roseana who briefly crossed and uncrossed her eyes at me. I smiled and turned back.

The doctor picked up an easel bearing a large flip-top chart with the bold fonted title, “Vas Deferens: Illustration”. He swung the easel around to his side, angling it so the three of us could read the chart.

“Let me see … which one —” He pulled away the cover, rifled through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. He flipped all the pages that preceded it over the top with such gusto that the easel’s two metal wheels lifted from the floor and almost toppled the easel until the doctor righted it. “Here we are,” he said, as though nothing had happened.

“Now,” he went on, “do you see this long white tube to the right? Looks like a noodle … a-a-a piece of spaghetti?”

“Yes.” We both nodded.

“That is the vas deferens — with the ‘a’ pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘vast’ — vass, just like you would pronounce it in vasectomy.”

For some reason, it was very important to him that we got the pronunciation right — which seemed odd to me. I came in for a vasectomy, not a lesson in pronunciation.

“I mean,” he went on, “have you ever heard of anyone calling it a vahz-ectomy, Mr. Squires?”

“No, sir, can’t say as I ever heard that before.”

“Fine, so it’s vass, yes?”

I cast a puzzled glance at Roseana and we nodded.

“Vass … okay. So, I want you to see this.” He removed an expandable metal pointer from his smock pocket, brought its tip slowly up and down the white tube, then stopped to study our faces.

“So, what we do is this, Mr. and Mrs. Squires …” — and I could have sworn he paused, as though to collect himself — “What we do,” he started again, “is … we look for a nice … little piece of vass .”

Now, I don’t know who erupted first, Roseana or me, but for a full minute we were doubled over and laughing so hard that neither of us could speak. By the time we got our vision back and some semblance of restraint, I noticed that the Doctor was staring, head atilt, at first Roseana and then me, a little twitch playing at the corners of his mouth, but he didn’t say a word. He just watched us.

There was no mistaking it. His intention was patently obvious by the way he had grilled us so on the pronunciation.

It was less obvious why he would perform such an undoctorly stunt. Did he really think it would lessen the natural fear of the procedure? Was he setting us up right from the get-go with his joke about having performed the procedure two or three times before he finally changed it to hundreds on hundreds of times?! And calling the whole ordeal the Friday Special — What the hell was that?

Now the reader would think that a prudent man, having witnessed such a vaudevillian spectacle as that, and by the very doctor in whose hands (not just figuratively, but literally), would be held the receptacle through which a generation of as yet unborn possible Pulitzer Prize winners, or sublimely happy garbage collectors, would issue; or, contrariwise, by the snip of a little piece of vass … hundreds of dead fishies would puddle — the reader would think that prudent man would have every reason to take his wife up on her earlier offer, and hand in hand, would leave the office, get in the car, and laugh all the way home.

You, the reader, would think so. Right?

However, the Doctor was faster than the prudence of my decision.

“So,” he said, getting to his feet, “if you will stay here, Mrs. Squires, your husband and I have some business to attend to. I promise I will bring him back to you within a half-hour.”

He stood before me as I got up. I was sure he was a perfectly good physician. I mean, they have to take the Hippocratic Oath, don’t they? I kept my eyes off Roseana as the doctor and I left the room.

*     *     *

The attractive, young — and I mean young — nurse smiled at me as we entered the operating room. She kept her smile as she continued stacking gauze squares on a metal tray that also held scissors, tape and other paraphernalia.

“We’ve got Mr. Squires here, Alice,” Dr. Zelko announced.

She smiled again at me, and we exchanged greetings. Lifting the metal tray, she carried it someplace behind a seven or eight-foot-long, floor-to-shoulder-high partition. A cot, or a gurney of sorts, had been pushed up against it, a pillow at one end, and a folded garment at the other.

The doctor indicated the garment with a dip of his head. “That is your gown. You’ll take it to the dressing room over there” — he pointed — “and remove all your clothing but your socks. Yes, you may wear your socks.”

He looked at my mouth like he was waiting for a smile to appear.

I obliged.

“Now, unlike most hospital gowns, this one opens in the front —" and then he smiled at an arriving thought —: “for obvious reasons.”

“Okay, I can do that,” I said, this time not acknowledging his smile.

“Okey-dokes, Mr. Squires. So, when you’ve changed into the gown, return here, climb up on the cot, facing the divider here. The pillow is there for your comfort. Oh, one more thing …”

He pointed to a place on the divider about eight inches above the middle of the cot. It looked like a miniature set of closed doors, a little larger than two decks of cards, side by side.

“It opens from the other side.” He spoke to the divider. “Alice…”

“Yes, Doctor Zelko.” And as by magic, the doll-house doors separated in the middle, and opened to a glimpse of Alice’s white nurse’s smock.

“You might as well just leave it open, Alice.”

The doctor studied me. “So, you know what that is for.” — a statement, not a question.

I’m sure I blushed, but I nodded.

“When you return,” he went on, “get onto the cot, face the divider and skootchy yourself up to the opened doors. Okay?”

“I think so.”

“Are you worried?”

“A little. How much pain can I expect.”

“None, really. We will freeze the injection site. You may feel a little pressure and then after a few minutes you will be completely numb there. Now,” he said, turning, “I’m going to scrub up while you get into … something more comfortable — just kidding, just kidding.”

Alice laughed. “Doctor Zelko!” A patch of her hair bobbed above the divider.

I grabbed the packet and headed toward the changing room.

The Puritans in America called them stocks: a hinged board with a hole for the head and two for the hands, which was cinched down on the neck and the wrists of the miscreant while the observers hurled insults, sometimes tomatoes, sometimes laughter.

In medieval Europe they called them pillories. Same use.

In this 20th century vasectomy clinic, and for all I knew, only in this vasectomy clinic, they called them — I don’t know what they called them — only that I, just now, skooched up against, and into it.

“Oh, hello there, little fella!” said Dr. Zelko, in the surprised voice you'd expect, not of a doctor, but of someone who’d just seen an animal trot through the door.

No, no, no, he couldn't! He wouldn’t!

Oh yes, yes, yes, he could! He would! And he did!

Nurse Alice giggled. “Dr. Zelko, ha-ha-ha!”

“And Mr. Squires, how are you doing over there?” he asked.

Like I was an entirely separate entity from what had just surprised him, trotting through the doggy door.

“Is that pillow comfortable enough? Are we ready?” Not waiting for my answer, he said, “You’ll feel a cold blast of air on your — genitalia … right now.” At the tail-end of a whishing sound, he asked, “… feel that?”

How could I not feel that? I frowned into the divider. “Yep.”

After a moment, I felt a slight pressure on my testicle.

“Did you feel the injection?”

“You've already given me — ?” I started.

“Told ya,” he said. “No pain. The rest is a piece of — ”

vass?

“— cake.”

Metal clinked against metal. I waited. For what, I had no idea.

“Alice, did you bring back the scalpels?”

“The scalpels?”

“The scalpels.” An edge of impatience to the doctor’s voice. “Remember? I loaned them to you for Thanksgiving dinner?”

“You loaned — ? Oh, you — you’re such a kidder, Dr. Zelko. Ha-ha, oh geez — ” Her voice changed direction. “Doctor’s just kidding, Mr. Squires.”

“Alice,” the doctor said, coolly. “I assure you, Mr. Squires knows I’m joking.”

“Dr. Zelko …” My own voice startled me. “I know full-well you’re joking. That’s the point. This whole day’s been a joke. If I wasn’t numbed up, I’d be off this cot in an instant and on my way home.” I huffed and felt my breath rebound hotly, into my face. “Now, can you just finish whatever’s left?”

You may think, Dear Reader, that I’d have been proud of having finally stood up to the wisecracking doctor. And well … I was. But that pride lasted no more than a few seconds before guilt washed over me. I’d hurt the feelings of this doctor who, for all I knew, was merely trying to use humor to lighten what could otherwise be a tense situation.

Besides, could I be sure that his hurt feelings wouldn’t morph into something sinister — this doctor in whose very hands —? I didn’t want to carry that thought to its conclusion.

For the next twenty minutes, icy professionalism ensued behind the divider. The two whispered instructions, midst the clicking of metal. Occasionally, the doctor sighed. I knew I’d hurt his feelings.

“Well,” Doctor Zelko finally announced, “we’re finished. You may slowly roll to your back and pull your gown over you. The nurse will help you stand and escort you over to the dressing room.” He paused a long moment. “You haven’t fallen asleep, have you, Mr. Squires?”

He couldn’t resist the final repartee.

I smiled. I wished he could see my smile. “I’m awake, Sir.” I rolled to my back, and brought both ends of the gown together in the front, but not before stealing a glance at the patches of taped gauze, a dim, dime-sized, purpling spot in the middle, that all but eclipsed the doctor’s handiwork. I waited.

“Once you are dressed,” Dr. Zelko announced rather levelly and without inflection, “Nurse Alice will escort you to your wife. On your way out, pick up the post-op instructions from the receptionist.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

He cleared his throat. I stared at the divider.

“You’re welcome,” he finally said.

Well … my story’s done. But I just want the reader to know, I still think of Dr. Zelko today. If he’s alive, he’d be about ninety at this writing. Retired — I think you’d join me in hoping.

When I think of Dr. Zelko, I also think of a popular TV show, called The Masked Singer. One of the panelists on that show, Ken Jeong —American born, of South Korean descent — is a comedian by profession.

As a comedian, Ken Jeong leaves MD off the end of his name. That’s right. Before making comedy his full-time passion, he was a physician in Woodland Hills, California. Quite a funny doctor, I imagine.

And that brings me full-circle back to Dr. Zelko. I wonder if Dr. Zelko retired a bitter man.

And I wonder if my justified, but ill-timed, complaint might have been the sown seeds of that bitterness he carried with him for the next twenty years until his retirement.

Before I came into his life, I imagine Dr. Zelko awakening each morning with a smile on his face, not because he was part of a worldwide team responsible for helping control the Earth’s population. Not that. What brought the smile was that perfect hilarity-producing one-liner that had stumped him before sleep, but that popped, unbidden, into his mind with the alarm’s sound.

Was comedy Dr. Zelko’s true mistress, as it was for Dr. Ken Jeong? Was the comedy circuit his true love?

And if it were … was I the lone heckler sitting in the darkened corner of his life, causing him to rethink his priorities.

I suppose I’ll never know.