You’re fairly certain that fathering more (or any) kids isn’t in your future so you want to weigh your options for preventing an unplanned pregnancy.
Topping this list for many men is a vasectomy — more than half a million men in the United States undergo a vasectomy each year.
At Arizona Urology, our team of men’s health care providers has no small amount of collective experience performing vasectomies. Given this experience, we’ve pulled together a list of points to consider if you’re considering a vasectomy. Let’s take a look.
The first thing you want to know is whether a treatment really works and we can attest that a vasectomy is one of the most effective birth control options available, with a near perfect protection rating of 99%.
No one particularly likes the idea of elective surgery, but we assure you that a vasectomy is a quick and easy procedure that we perform right here in our offices in under 30 minutes.
In fact, it’s hardly a surgery at all as we use the most advanced techniques available, including no-scalpel procedures. Instead of making an incision in your scrotum, we make one tiny puncture in your scrotum to access, and seal, cut, or tie off, your vas deferens — the tubes that deliver sperm from your testes.
We also don’t use general anesthesia, just local anesthesia, so you won’t be groggy for the rest of the day, though we suggest that you take it easy. You can even drive yourself home afterward, in most cases.
While you may experience some soreness for a day or two after your vasectomy, most men recover quickly and uneventfully. You can use ice packs and over-the-counter pain medications to relieve the soreness.
One of the biggest points we want to make is that your protection against impregnating a woman isn’t in place right after your vasectomy. Sperm can linger on the other side of the block we create in your vas deferens.
So, we’ll perform a semen analysis at about the 10- to 12-week mark to make sure that your ejaculate is sperm-free.
In the meantime, it’s important that you use other birth control methods.
If, somewhere down the road, you change your mind about fathering children, vasectomies are reversible, but the procedure is far more complex than the original one — it’s a 2- to 4-hour surgery under general anesthesia.
The good news is that we have a microsurgeon on staff who excels in vasectomy reversals and, when they’re done correctly, they boast success rates between 80% and 90%.
If you have more questions about the vasectomy or you’d like to determine whether you’re a good candidate for the popular procedure, we invite you to schedule an appointment at one of our offices in Phoenix, Goodyear, Gilbert, and Glendale, Arizona, today for a thorough evaluation.
