A vasectomy patient has joked about how the earthquake that struck New York City this week happened in the middle of his surgery.
Justin Allen, 33, was on an operating table in Pennsylvania on Friday morning when he felt the building move because of the 4.8 magnitude tremor, which had its epicentre in neighbouring New Jersey.
Mr Allen said he thought it might be a train, until his surgeon paused and asked “That’s an earthquake, right?”
“I figured he was messing with me,” Mr Allen told the website Betches: “I thought it was him trying to be funny.
“I can’t say definitively if he was in between testicle[s], but he was down there when we felt the whole room shake.
“It continued on for a minute or two and [the doctor] asked the nurse, ‘How long does an earthquake typically last?’ And she said, ‘A minute or two.’”
Steven Hirshberg, the urologist who performed the operation at Midlantic Urology in Huntingdon Valley, told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The room was shaking – I wasn’t shaking.
“We all just kept laughing about how we’d never forget where we were when this was happening – because who would even believe that story?”
Once the building stopped shaking, Dr Hirshberg finished and apologised – Mr Allen’s vasectomy had taken one minute longer than usual.
The patient then posted on X, formerly Twitter, about his experience. “A f—ing earthquake happened in the middle of my vasectomy,” he wrote in a post that soon went viral.
He has since said he wants to be known as the Earthquake Snipper.
Mr Allen’s wife Bridget retweeted the post with a photo of her husband giving a thumbs-up outside the medical centre.
“The fact that he walked out of his vasectomy and took a picture outside the building with his thumbs up is the experience all guys should have with their vasectomy,” Dr Hirshberg said.
Mrs Allen later added that the earthquake was a sign that “we should never ever ever have another child ever again … ever”.
The couple had planned the operation in November, while Mrs Allen was pregnant with their second child, who was born on Feb 29.
‘It’s worth it for the story’
Mr Allen told one reporter that if he could turn back time, he would not choose to reschedule the operation. “Honestly, I think it’s kind of worth it for the story,” he said.
He is now recovering well but has had to mute his social media posts and notifications. “There’s a lot of funny responses and some that are definitely cringeworthy, so I had to mute,” he said.
Friday’s tremor was the largest felt in New York City since a 2011 5.8-magnitude earthquake in Virginia. The quake’s epicentre was about 40 miles west of the city.
“This is one of the largest earthquakes on the east coast in the last century,” Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, said.
The post I felt the earth move in the middle of my vasectomy, says shocked father of two appeared first on The Telegraph.
