CNN reports, “Forget college basketball players cutting down the nets after a victory. Some fans of March Madness are making their own monumental snips: vasectomies.

“If you are going to be laid up on the couch for a few days, you might as well get (a vasectomy) done when there is some great college basketball on TV,” said Mike LaSalle, a 40-year-old father of two who had a vasectomy Friday. “You had all the conference championship games over the weekend and the NCAA tourney starts this week.”

Dr. Philip Werthman, urologist to the rich and famous in Los Angeles, performed the vasectomy on LaSalle, who is a partner in a private equity firm.

“(LaSalle) came in wearing his Notre Dame cap,” said Werthman with a laugh. “He said, ‘My team is not in it this year, but I might as well hang out at watch the March Madness games.'”

Werthman says he is booked solid throughout the year, so he sees no spike in the number of vasectomies during March Madness.

But he does see patients jockeying for coveted time slots just before and during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament by booking the procedures much earlier than usual.

A major clinic in Ohio reports it performs 40 or 50 more vasectomies a month before and during the 68-team basketball tourney.

“We do have (in March) typically about 50% more vasectomies than in other months,” said Dr. Ed Sabanegh, chairman of the Department of Urology at the Cleveland Clinic.

“A lot of patients come in and say, ‘I have to have this during March Madness, you have to talk to my wife about it. Tell her what my limitations are and that I need to be on the couch.’

“They’ll even tell us to exaggerate a little about how long it takes to recover.”

Sabanegh adds some enthusiastic fans stroll into their procedures, which take 30 minutes to an hour, sporting the jerseys of their favorite teams, and one fan prepared for his vasectomy recovery with a colorful aid.”

Read the entire article here: CNN
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