Vasectomy
Email Raji.Kooner@svha.org.au or call 02 8382 6980 for a confidential appointment.
A vasectomy should be considered by patients to be an irreversible procedure.1
It really involves a long discussion between the patient and his partner before we would advise patients to undergo a vasectomy.
Essentially the procedure is done either under local anaesthetic or a mild general anaesthetic.
The vas which is a tube that comes from the kidney and the bladder and produces sperm is immobilised, a small segment is then resected.
What I do is leave the testicular end or the bottom end free and tie the top end.
I also suture the bottom end in a separate plain to decrease the chance of these two ends joining together.
It’s usually a day procedure and patients are usually very comfortable the next day and usually able to return to work.2
It’s very important to consider a vasectomy as irreversible.
You have to wait two to three months for sperm counts to show no sperm to be present.
There is a low chance one in 3,0003 that the ends might rejoin again, called spontaneous recanalisation.
We do offer sperm donation for patients if they so choose and it’s also important to remember that there’s a small incidence of post vasectomy pain syndrome2.
References
1. Gavin Stormont; Christopher M. Deibert - Vasectomy - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549904/2. Randall B. Meacham - Criteria for Determining That a Vasectomy Has Succeeded - Journal of Andrology - 02 January 2013 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1939-4640.2003.tb02698.x
3. Fang Yang, Junjun Li, Liang Dong - Review of Vasectomy Complications and Safety Concerns - World J Mens Health. 2021 Jul; 39(3): 406–418. Published online 2020 Jul 30. doi: 10.5534/wjmh.200073