My Favorite (and all) body modifications
Article Table of Contents
- LASIK vision correction in ~2016
- Tongue Tie “Revision”/Repair in 2024
- Vasectomy, permanent birth control
In the range of the human experience, there’s a lot of possible body modifications one can purchase for oneself. Over the years, I’ve purchased three.
LASIK vision correction in ~2016 #
When I was pretty young, mid-20s, my then-employer placed like a few thousand dollars a year into an HSA account for me, as I switched to a ‘high deductible health plan’, so since it felt like ‘free money’, I decided to spend it on LASIK. Possibly right after a long climbing trip, and I remembered struggling with glasses (mine were heavy and prone to falling off my face) and contacts (dealing with contacts without running water for days on end isn’t tons of fun)
For about $3500, I got LASIK somewhere in Rockville, MD, and for a long time I’d say it was the best thing I’d ever spent money on. It’s now one of the top things I’ve spent money on, still ranks very highly.
I used to take contacts out of my eyes in tents, then wake up and try to get contacts back in my eyes. I would clean my hands before touching my contacts (which would then touch my eye, of course I never actually touch my eye with my finger, when placing/removing contacts).
I also didn’t like the dependence on the contact subscription, getting new ones every few months, etc. Some of you know the drill.
Driving in the morning into the rising sun, wishing I had sunglasses, but preferring the comfort of my glasses.
At night, not being able to see clearly while moving around my room until I put my glasses on.
Issues with helmets, hair.
I didn’t/don’t actually dislike my glasses much, but it wasn’t until I was fully free of them, post surgury, that I could feel in my bones all the ways I was accommodating my need for HEFTY vision correction. I’m pleased that I had a great, normal-ideal outcome from the surgury.
Without glasses, my vision was so bad i really couldn’t drive, and walking on any sort of uneven surface could be dicy. Anyway, that was over a decade ago, now I just live life as a person who has perfect vision every time my eyes are open. It’s so cool.
Tongue Tie “Revision”/Repair in 2024 #
Skip over a decade forward… Eden, who is now a toddler, was born. She was born with a tongue and lip tie, and it was preventing her from being able to breastfeed!
We were lucky and fortunate to get it fixed when she was five or six days old, but at that point it had been missed by many medical professionals.
She’d been losing weight, basically starving, because her mouth and tongue and lips could not work together in the correct way to generate suction. Her mom’s milk wasn’t coming in. For the mom’s body to make milk, the baby needs to be ‘requesting’ it, and if the tongue and lips are not free to move in the right way, there is no good requesting going on.
After that, I didn’t think about a tongue tie again for years. “It’s heritable” they said. eventually, it bubbled up in my brain a few times. All sorts of oral health/mouth functioning/breathing things relate to the proper movement of that muscle in the bottom of the mouth.
A tongue tie can be related to things like sleep apnea like syptoms (the tongue falls into the back of the mouth), which can relate to teeth grinding, because the way the brain ‘frees’ the airway after the tongue has obstructed it is by moving the jaw back and forth!
Back pain (lower back pain) was related to teh tongue tie - my head had been slightly tilted forward/downward because of the reduced mobility. One of the functional tests of a tongue tie is if you can tilt your head all the way up and still swallow. When I had a tonue tie, I couldn’t swallow, I had to bring my chin back towards the ground to ‘get space’. These are all observations that were made most clear post procedure.
It’s a wild change, I am a huge fan. Lots of things are different, better.
I explain more, much more, in the blog post:
👉 i got my tongue tie fixed, and it rocked my world.
Tongue tie’s correlate to things (that I was actively experiencing) like: all sorts of mouth problems, sleep-apnea-like symptoms, sometimes sounding like I’m choking while sleeping, but I didn’t snore.
I had some of the best sleep of my life after the tongue tie revision.
I didn’t appreciate how free the structures SHOULD be, between the tongue, throat, sternum, and the top of the spine. After mine was fixed, my head sat in a slightly different tilt/orientation, and there’s less/zero forward lean and there’s less strain on my lower back.
Again, here’s the full blog post:
Vasectomy, permanent birth control #
Also in 2024, I had already realized that I felt fully satisified with Eden as my kid, and do not want to have another kid. I’d always figured I’d get a vasectomy whenever I was ‘done having kids’, and I think that is an easily arrived-upon spot with even one kid.
I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does “no-scalpel vasectomy with no-needle anesthesia.” $800, 30 minute appointment in Boulder, basically zero discomfort during or after the procedure. No intake call. He’s exceptionally competant, as you’ll see if you click around. If you want a vasectomy and don’t live in colorado, Chris’ methodology is still worth checking out, because if someone else doesn’t seem to be at the same level of quality as him, keep looking.
Having a kid is a big deal, and so is not having a kid. For a bunch of crappy reasons it seems like the responsibility of not getting pregnant is carried mostly by people who can become pregnant, the people with vulvas.
Options for male birth control have been popping up, like RISUG in india, relabeled as Vaselgel in the USA. (inject an ionized polymer into the vans deferans, it causes cell walls/tails of sperm to be damaged, they still exit the body like normal but are ‘non-functional’, and is permanent, reliable, and reversable) but the various authorities in the USA related to health advances are trash and absent, so people with penises and people with vulvas continue to suffer without abundant, reliable, non-hormonal birth control.
I got a vasectomy as a step in the direction of carrying more of the responsibility than I was before of not getting anyone pregnant. It’s a big deal to decide to ‘not have more kids’, perhaps, but it’s a big deal to ‘have another kid’. In 2025, having any children feels enormously delicate, risky.
If everyone has a recent-enough STI panel and discussed it, the remaining reason for condoms is the REALLY CRITICAL ISSUE of not getting pregnant. Huzzah for improved margins of safety.
I have a friend of a friend whose then-partner lied to him about taking birth control, and intentionally, without his permission, became pregnant by him. Horrifying. There’s lots of good ways of not getting pregnant, and most of them seem fully, unfairly, on the shoulders of the person who has the uterus. Also, if one gets pregnant and wants to be not pregnant, all options are stressful. Having Plan B on hand seems reasonable, and of course I’m an all-the-way supporter of access to easy, skilled, ideally free abortions, too. It is noteworthy to me that the catholic church made a HUGE deal of making sure birth control/pregnancy management was as unavailable to it’s people as possible.
Virtually all forms of birth control available to the people who can get pregant are heavy duty. IUD or the pill, both are a hassle, and IUD placements are often-enough very bad experiences.
I have a lot of thoughts about the obligation of not getting anyone pregnant. Things went poorly with my kid’s mom, I wouldn’t have tried to do parenthood in the exact way I’m doing it now, and EVEN IF things had gone great with Eden and her mom, I still would want a vasectomy for myself. I still don’t want more than 1 kid.
It’s easy to be generous as a parent with time when there is one child. It’s easy to be generous with emotional energy. It’s easy(er) to be unpressured in schedule, location needs, etc. Multiple kids seems gnarly, all-consuming. I can carry 100% of my children on my scooter (with a special harness/strap) because I have a single child. How convenient for me. School drop-offs for life can be done via a two-wheeled vehicle thus I’ll never have to sit in a line of cars. Ever, in my life. Seems nice.
American culture is individualistic, so there’s no natural community for raising multiple kids. For this reason alone I think it’s fairest to everyone, including any already-born children, to not take from their resource pool what would be needed by another child in the mix.
Anyway, the vasectomy was the “right” kind. I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does no scalpel vasectomy with no needle anesthesia. Super chill, quick, he’s got spots around colorado, I took the flatiron flyer bus from Denver to a few blocks from his office in Boulder, caught a later bus back, and was good to go. No more kids for me.
I was thrilled that there was no consultation required with Dr. Tonozzi. I’d called around denver urologists and other offices, doing a little research after reading up on Reddit, and was amazed when multiple offices thought that it was fine to tell me I had to show up for a $250 intake appointment before anyone would authorize scheduling me for a vasectomy! So much needless complexity to accommodate how some americans see health care.
anyway…
I really struggle to find the right tone to talk about some of these things.
I’ve spoken about vasectomies now with a few different friends. I heard about one of these from his female partner - she said “I wish my [50 year old!!!] partner was willing to get a vasectomy bc I hate having to use birth control”
Her partner has multiple kids! She has multiple kids! She doesn’t want more, he “thinks” he doesn’t want more! I couldn’t imagine being him.
the risk profile is not the same, between people with penises and people with vulvas. It’s wildly risky to become pregant! people plan for and hope to have kids all the time, and are anxious throughout the process, because it’s risky.
It seems worth noting also something like:
Sometimes/often times emotional safety correlates with enjoyable-for-all sexual experiences. A sense of emotional safety gets built in many different ways. Having taken real steps to measurably improve the risk profile around pregnancy dramatically increases a sense of safety for some people.
My own emotional safety goes way up. A partner’s sense of emotional safety can go up. There’s plenty of world for deep emotional safety (and great sex) without having a vasectomy, but it’s unamibigous, undeniable, that the margin of safety is higher. I didn’t realize how much more peace I would feel having sex, post-vasectomy, than before.
Anyway, if you’re in Denver/Boulder/Colorado, Chris Tonozzi at GoVasectomy is the way. ~$800, and a 30 minute appointment. He and I chatted the whole time, and I watched the whole procedure with curiosity and interest.
That’s it, there’s my body modifications. I’m thrilled with all of them, and if you are eligible for any of them, you might enjoy having some of these too.