Citizen of the Week: Dr. Harold Stopp
The deed is done.
Since it’s sperm week here at Granola Box, I thought it best to designate my urologist, Dr. Harold Stopp as Citizen of the Week. When I tell anyone from outside the Rochester area that the guy doing my vasectomy is Dr. Stopp, they think I’m kidding. However, when you mention getting a vasectomy around here, it’s assumed you’re going to see Dr. Stopp.
Dr. Stopp has been performing vasectomies in Rochester for over thirty years, and has done around 39,000 operations. He’s responsible for between one third and one half of the vasectomies in Rochester in any given year during his time in practice.
He’s gotten so efficient at the procedure that he’s discovered ways to make it far less invasive. Patients are supposedly able to drive themselves home and return to work the next day. As I lay here on my back waiting for my next dose of ibuprofen though, I can’t imagine driving home or returning to work the next day could be very comfortable.
Dr. Stopp is definitely old school. His office is in an austere Stalinesque building just down the street from Rochester General Hospital. With the exception of his waiting room, there’s nothing resembling decoration anywhere in the building. The surgical rooms are the same way. Nothing there except the table and the metal instruments Dr. Stopp uses. Nothing fancy here.
Despite the stark exterior surroundings, Dr. Stopp is a warm, friendly grandfatherly figure who after 39,000 procedures knows exactly what the patient is going to be feeling at any given moment. There’s no surprises and, after the initial novocain to the nuts, no pain. Until it wears off that is.
He went through the post-operative protocol a couple times between tugs and snips of my vas deferens. The tricky part about vasectomy recovery is apparently you don’t know if you’ve been too active until, as Dr. Stopp put it, you wake up in the morning with painful balls the size of grapefruits. He also explained that the rest of the sperm in my system just dries up as soon as it figures out that no more can get out. The fun part of the post-operative regimen is that “the more you use it, the quicker you lose it.”
Now I have a week of walking ever-so-carefully and taking copious amounts of ibuprofen to look forward to. All from a thirty minute dance of suture and scalpel from Dr. Stopp.
Filed under: General Observations, Citizen of the Week on October 19th, 2007
Yeah I’ve been a bit silent on the whole cut yo nuts thing, the idea of someone going towards my balls with a knife is just a little beyond me but its much better than having the wife do the female version. Anyway hope all is well with the boys and now I just need to comment on the doctors name. Dr. Stopps is who does Vasectomies is funny, but I can top it.
At my sisters graduation from GW university, on the ellipse at the white house, Tony Bennet gave the commencement speech then ended with a song (the year before was Matalin Albright) and the whole time my father and I giggled while my mother tried to stay reserved as we flipped through the names of those getting honorary degrees there it was, Dr, Harry C. Beaver - Gynecologist.