The key thing is testing fluid for sperm during the operation. We spoke to 3 other surgeons who said they didn’t do this, as it was costly and unnecessary. We decided that we’d rather pay more, and just pay once. We are seriously so glad that we chose our surgeon.
Basically the standard vas to vas join has the best results. The more complicated to epididymis has less good results, but is often required if the original vasectomy was more than 6 years ago.
We paid for the more expensive, complicated operation, ie vas to epididymis. However, on testing the fluid, the surgeon found sperm present. Therefore, he managed to do the vas to vas join. But as he explained, if you don’t test for sperm in the fluid, you have no way of knowing that you are joining up two “live tubes”.
Basically we paid for the long complicated theatre time, in case we needed the vas to epididymis surgery. We ended up with the simpler vas to vas, but didn’t mind that we’d paid more, as we knew our results would be better with the vas to vas join being done.
We took the view that paying for the long theatre time was a good insurance policy, so that the surgeon could just do whatever would give us the best chance on the day.