Varicocele repair surgery can result in a significant improvement in semen parameters in 60% to 70% of men, with natural pregnancy rates up to 50%. Men with larger varicoceles tend to have poorer semen quality than those with smaller varicoceles, and tend to have greater improvement with repair surgery.
Overall, a significant percentage of couples who undergo varicocele repair surgery will go on to achieve pregnancy without ART, and those who do need ART will have optimized their sperm quality.
It takes 90 days (3 months) for the male body to generate new sperm, so no improvements will be seen for 3 months following the surgery, with best results occurring in the first year, and some even into the second year following the surgery.
How this relates to us:
Since B and I have scheduled the surgery for the first week of April, that put our TTC routine on hold until around the week of the 4th of July. Some things I've read online claim that better results are seen after 6 months, so that will put us at October before we'd really have our hopes up. If it doesn't happen by the end of the year (trying naturally), then I think we'd be ready to allocate some money into our flex spending account for 2013 to try a few more rounds of IUI next year.
If trying naturally and with IUI's through 2013 doesn't work for us, then the next step would hopefully be saving up for IVF in 2014 or beyond. I'll be 32, turning 33 by then, so our odds of successful IVF will still be high, but we'd only have a couple of years to get it done before my fertility starts falling.
But seriously, IVF? The idea of saving up $13,000 for one round of fresh IVF cycle seems plausible by then... but what if that doesn't work what would we do? With the plan described above, IVF is obviously our last resort.
We could try to save up for the "shared risk" programs out there, where you pay $20,000 to $26,000 for 3 rounds of fresh and 3 rounds of frozen, and if it doesn't work, you get some or most of your money back. But where would we come up with that kind of cash? It would take longer, and then again my fertility will just decline further the longer we wait.
I wish I had a crystal ball. I'd love to know that I'm just "catastrophe" thinking right now and we'll be pregnant naturally this summer. Or that one round of IVF will get us twins and we'll be done. Or that nothing will work but a 3rd frozen IVF cycle and so I should not bother getting my hopes up with anything else along the way.
Also, I wish we'd win the lottery. That would solve a lot of our problems.
I've read a recent research in which it is stated that 40% men and 50% women are suffering from infertility. Now we can't blame only women for infertility.
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Good post!! for varicocele many non surgical treatments are came up and varicocele embloisation is one among them it takes minimal recovery time and showing highest success rate. My uncle took varicocele treatment by Dr. Abhilash at http://www.interventionsinradiology.com/. He was completely cured now.
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