Putting Family Building Back on the Table with a Vasectomy Reversal

You look back on your life and reflect on the different paths taken — paths that made perfect sense at the time. If one of these roads was a vasectomy and you’re now rethinking that decision and you want family planning back in the mix, it’s time to start exploring a vasectomy reversal.

At Arizona Urology, our team of men’s health experts is here to meet you where you’re at with family planning. By this, we mean that we offer two opposing services — the vasectomy and the vasectomy reversal. 

In this month’s blog, we’re going to focus on the latter — vasectomy reversal — and how it can help you re-enter the world of family-building.

Vasectomy reversal — a more challenging procedure

Each year in the United States, about half a million men undergo a vasectomy, which does its job well by providing a near-perfect protection rating of more than 99%. Not only is a vasectomy effective, but it’s also a relatively quick and easy procedure during which we disconnect the tubes (your vas deferens) that deliver sperm into your semen.

With a vasectomy reversal, we need to perform a type of microsurgery to reconnect the ends of your vas deferens to allow sperm to flow back through.

So, while your vasectomy was an in-office, outpatient procedure that took all of 30 minutes, don’t expect the same from the reversal, which can last several hours (though we can perform it on an outpatient basis).

To start, we typically use general anesthesia or sedation because the procedure takes longer. As for how long, that’s hard to say, as we have to see what we’re up against when we access your vas deferens.

In straightforward cases, during a vasectomy reversal, we remove any scar tissue that’s formed around the severed ends of your vas deferens, and then we reconnect those ends using a microscope and tiny sutures. We only proceed after testing the vasal fluid for sperm.

If we find that your vasal fluid isn’t holding any sperm from your testicles, this implies a blockage somewhere in the tubes. In this case, we need to bypass one end of your vas deferens and connect the other directly to your epididymis, which stores sperm above each of your testicles.

How well does a vasectomy reversal work?

As you can see, the reversal is a bit more complicated than your original vasectomy, but that’s not to say it isn’t successful. 

We measure success in different ways, and our primary metric is the reversal of your sterilization. So, if there’s sperm in your ejaculate, then the vasectomy reversal is successful, and this is the case with 60% to 95% of procedures.

As for whether you achieve your family-building goal, there’s a lot more to plug into that equation than re-establishing sperm delivery, such as your partner’s fertility. As well, the age of your original vasectomy can matter — procedures performed more than 15 years ago tend to make it more difficult to restore fertility.

So, while we’ve been successful in restoring fertility in our patients through vasectomy reversal, please know that this doesn’t guarantee kids down the road. That said, the procedure certainly sets you on the right path toward that end, and our goal here is to manage expectations.

If you’d like to learn more about vasectomy reversal and whether you’re a good candidate, contact us at one of our offices in Phoenix, Goodyear, Gilbert, and Glendale, Arizona, today to schedule a consultation.