Word: vasa
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...operation that Maharashtra's doctors were performing in such numbers last week is a vasectomy, a simple surgical procedure that is less costly, complicated and confining than female sterilization. The surgeon merely snips off a small section of the vasa deferentia, the tiny tubes that transport sperm from the testes to the ejaculatory duct. A local anesthetic is used, the vasa are tied off, and two stitches are taken to close the wound in the scrotum. The operation takes about ten minutes and requires only three days of convalescence. Indian surgeons tell patients to abstain from sexual relations...
Even before he began the Vasaloppet (Vasa Run), Sweden's gut-racking cross-country skiing championship, Farmer Gunnar Larsson had good reason to feel discouraged. He had tried the 50-mile grind in eight previous races and never finished better than fourth. Now he was 35, and the long trail that led from Sälen, near the Norwegian border, to the small town of Mora, deep in the picturesque province of Dalecarlia, looked tougher than ever. Weather on the course veered from dim to foul. At the starting line, mist lay heavy over the hilltops, and skis...
...neither Gunnar nor any other ablebodied Swede would consider quitting the Vasa Run until legs or lungs gave out. For the history of the race runs all the way back to the start of Sweden's independence. It began in greater discouragement than Gunnar or his competitors ever knew. In the bitter winter of 1520, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, then 24 and a fugitive from a Jutland prison, came to Dalecarlia with news of the "Stockholm Blood Bath," a mass beheading of Swedish noblemen with which Christian II, already King of Denmark and Norway, had celebrated his coronation as ruler...
...After Vasa left, other fugitives arrived with word of Christian's massacre. Aroused at last, the peasants sent their fastest skiers to catch Vasa. These couriers stopped him only 20 miles from the border, the present site of Sälen. Now the Vasa Run commemorates his return, the start of the revolution that freed Sweden...
...last week Gunnar Larsson started from Sälen just as Vasa did, with hope. He pushed steadily across the wooded hills and frozen streams of the irregular land. Before the race was over, more than 100 exhausted skiers of the 583-man field had quit, but Larsson, as usual, stuck it out. On his ninth try, he swept first across the finish line near a statue of King Gustav Vasa that marks the spot where the young revolutionary harangued the Dalecarlian peasants four centuries ago. For one year, until time for the next Vasaloppet, Gunnar Larsson will be Sweden...