“It’s All in Your Head”: My Post-Vasectomy Pain Story

By Andre Minoli · Medically reviewed by Mary Carol Jennings, MD, MPH

Hi — I’m Andre. It’s nice to meet you.

I’m a member of several chronic pain communities, and when people hear pieces of my story, they often ask for the whole thing. I’m also the founder and designer of Flare, and the app exists because of this story — so it feels right to tell it here, once, properly.

I mourn who I was before. That’s the truest opening sentence I have.

It’s hard to talk about this in person. People — kind, well-meaning people — don’t know how to react, especially when your pain involves something as intimate as your testicles. “Oh.” That’s usually where the conversation ends. So I stopped bringing it up, even though some part of me wants the world to know. To notice me. To see that I hurt. Chronic pain is cruel that way: invisible exactly where you most need a witness. And it got crueler the day a doctor told me it was all in my head.

The jolt

Let me back up, because this started with good intentions: I wanted a vasectomy. I researched the best option in my area and booked it without a second thought. No conversation about risks. The words post-vasectomy pain syndrome did not exist to me then — you hear so many stories about how quick and painless it all is.

It wasn’t. While working on the left vas, the surgeon suddenly tugged, sending an electrifying jolt of pain through my left side — a jolt that never fully subsided. Weeks after the procedure I could still feel its echo. On a phone call, the doctor said it would pass soon: take ibuprofen, keep icing. So I did.

“It’s all in your head”

Three weeks later, feeling no improvement, I went to his office.

“It’s all in your head,” he said. It’s your emotions. Stop reading Google. I’ve performed ten thousand of these and it’s never gone wrong.

I remember being furious in a way I have never been before or since — not because he couldn’t fix me, but because I was invisible to him. I walked out dismissed, and a deep depression followed.

Here is what I know now and didn’t then: post-vasectomy pain syndrome is a recognized condition in the urology literature, with its own diagnostic workups and treatment algorithms. It is not an emotion. It is not Google’s fault. Some pain simply doesn’t read the statistics before arriving.

My-Pain.xls

That fury is where Flare was born — except it wasn’t called Flare then. It was called My-Pain.xls: a plain spreadsheet where I tracked my symptoms, every day. (A cleaned-up descendant of that spreadsheet is free to copy, if you want it.) If the doctor didn’t believe me, I was going to prove it to him.

The sheet did two things I never expected.

First, the simple act of logging — of doing one small thing for myself — felt like doing something positive. However small, it was a small torch in the darkness.

Second, it showed me the shape of my pain. It ebbed and flowed. There were flare-up spikes, and there were stretches where I felt almost normal. When I was inside a spike, drowning in the “this is forever” spiral, the data quietly said otherwise: this intensity is not forever — two days, maybe three. I could hold onto that. Sometimes it was the only thing I could hold onto.

A year at different volumes

I lived like that for about a year: obsessively logging every symptom, activity, and treatment, and searching for patterns.

My pain was strange, because it was hard to describe as pain. It didn’t hurt in the traditional sense — or maybe I had lived with it so long that “hurt” was too abstract a word for it. It was a sickening feeling deep in my groin, nowhere I could point to, but unmistakably on the left side, where the jolt had been. A nauseating burn that could not be ignored, relieved, or even made worse. Just a constant, playing at different volumes underneath everything.

I tried what there was to try: pelvic floor physical therapy, ice baths, hot baths, prescription painkillers, gabapentin. The spreadsheet kept honest score, and the score was that I was not getting better.

It is the closest thing to torture I have ever cared to know. I was trapped in my own body, and my body was the one doing it. I cried every night. My wife did too. Every thought passed through the filter of the pain, and it made me someone I didn’t recognize — short-fused, dark, set off by the smallest things.

The doctor who saw me

After about a year, I made the hard decision: I would go under the knife again — this time for a targeted microdenervation of the spermatic cord, performed by Dr. Parviz Kavoussi in Austin, Texas.

I get teary-eyed thinking about him, and not only because the surgery worked. Before any of that, he did the thing nobody else had done: he saw me. I brought a year of My-Pain.xls to that consultation, and he didn’t wave it away — he read it. The pattern I had been recording all those months, he recognized, and it helped him diagnose me. The thing I could never point to was finally visible: on paper, to a doctor, who was nodding. And then he had a plan, and real confidence that he could make me better.

The procedure went about as well as it could have. Not one hundred percent — call it eighty. Which, in my book, is a great success.

Where I am now

Some years later, the sensation is still with me. I can feel it right now, writing this sentence. But it is manageable in a way it never was before: I can forget about it for long stretches. I still get the occasional flare-up — and when I do, my own data tells me what my catastrophizing brain won’t: it lasts a day or two. It’s not forever.

Other marks remain. I cry at the dentist now — something about being in a clinical chair while someone works on my body. The mental trauma has been the slowest thing to heal. But day by day, I get a little further away from that day. And slowly, as best I can, I return to the person I mourned.

That spreadsheet eventually became Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker. Nearly everything about it — custom symptoms in your own words, five plain severity levels, reports built to hand to a doctor — exists because of what you just read: pain that fit no template, and a year of needing proof that it was real.

If you’re somewhere in your own year one: you are not invisible, it is not in your head, and it helps more than you’d guess to write it down — in an app, in a spreadsheet, on paper, anywhere. Someone who can help is more likely to see you when there’s something to see.

Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker is a symptom-tracking tool, not a medical device. This article is general information, not medical advice — talk to your doctor about decisions affecting your health.