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Originally Posted by holidayroad
Was it really horrible? My son (8) wasn't circumsized at birth because of some other medical issues. His doctor said he may have to be circumsized at some point in the future. I have never met anyone else who had it done later in life, so I would like to know more about your experience. That way, I'll know what to expect.
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It was inexplicably horrible. For one thing, I really had no idea what I was going in for. I figured it would just be like going to the barber- just take a little bit off the top and the sides. I had no idea that I would end up in the maternity ward. My last memory before going under general anesthesia was looking over and seeing these knocked out women with their huge baby bumps around me. Weird!
I woke up with intense pain. Intense. And it was just a big bloodied pulp down there with nothing but a perfunctorily placed strip of gauze tied around the end, which had already blackened and hardened from all of the bleeding. But as bad as all of that was, I think the worst part of the whole experience was being 8/9 years old and constantly having these strange people at the hospital checking on my junk. So embarassing!
To this day I really have no idea why my parents had me go through with this. First of all, it was NOT medically necessary. I have fond memories of my intact boy parts. And it's not like I had health insurance back then (I nearly died from food poisoning but the parents were too cheap to take me to the emergency room... but that's another story for another time), so they were definitely paying for all of this out of pocket. One theory is that my father started reading this King James bible that had been lying around the house (I don't know how it got in the house to start with), which is all fine and dandy, whatever. But the problem is that English was not his first language. So I figure he must've read all of that spooky sh** in the Old Testament about boys having to be circumcised in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, blah blah blah. And being that my parents are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch, I think they interpreted this literally as, "OMG, if he doesn't get snipped, he's going straight to HELL!" The other theory is that we all went to this old Korean doctor that I despised with a passion. Even as a kid I knew he was utterly incompetent. And he struck me as the kind of doctor who would parrot anything he read, just because I didn't think he possessed the critical thinking skills to draw his own conclusions. So surely he must have read some poorly researched article about circumcision and then tried to act like he was saving my life by compelling my parents to force me into it. Either way, it sucks. It just plain sucks. More than any physical pain, I am just so pissed off that this kind of ignorant misinformation has led directly to my mutilation.
I am curious... why does your son's doctor feel that circumcision is warranted? I can assure you that it's not. The U.S. is like the only country that does this sort of thing routinely, and it's not like the U.S. has the longest life expectancy or the highest quality of life.