For years I wondered where one of my testicles had gone.  I mean I might have been born with just one, but I suspected I might have been fairly normal and have actually been allocated two.  I know some males have three but that is pretty unusual apparently.

Anyway,  I was a slow developer and in my mid teens I started to wonder why I only had one.  I continued wondering for the next half century or so largely because I was too embarrassed to ask my mother.

Not that the one I had didn't  work; I'd already fathered three children.

Eventually when I was in my seventies and my mother was in her nineties, I popped the question. It took so long to ask because I was very shy when I was young and it just took me a long time to get over it.

According to my mother a country doctor in Victoria had removed my appendix when I was 13.  My mother said he had found the errant testicle--apparently it had not descended as it was supposed to and he had whipped it out with the appendix.

Anyway after having three children it became necessary to restrain the one I still had and I booked in to a Shepparton hospital to have a vasectomy.

With my farm background I knew it could be a pretty straightforward operation. If you had rams you didn't want to breed from, you picked up an instrument called a burrdizzo. Rather like the jaws of a modern rabbit or dog trap you close them across the scrotum and above the testicles to sever the sperm supply line as it were. However the skin is not affected.

Well, I thought my op might be as simple and as fast as that, but there was a standard procedure and it was a bit more complicated.

I thought that as only one testicle was involved, it was a bit rich charging the whole Medicare standard fee. Two thirds was all that was justified in my book.

To add insult to injury, when I came to drive home I found my car's battery was flat, a bit like me, and I had to push it to start it.