My husband has a varicocele. Our FS suggested that his morphology, motility and count were all so bad that a repair probably wouldn't improve things enough to have any impact and that IVF with ICSI was really our only hope.

A urologist we consulted suggested embolisation over a surgical repair as it is less invasive with a quicker recovery time - but some quirk of DH's anatomy made it impossible for them to turn the right corners in his veins and they couldn't get to the varicocele in order to do anything with it.

At that point - considering my own fertility issues were also fairly significant, we elected to just continue with IVF/ICSI. We have a 15 month old child now, and two frozen embryos waiting so really aren't likely to do anything about the repair at all now, but in hindsight, even if a repair couldn't fix things to the point that natural conception was possible, I think I would get it done so as to get better quality sperm for IVF/ICSI. With our last cycle, we were only able to fertilise 3 of 12 eggs, I feel that we could have done better with better sperm, but we are happy with the family we have now - even if our two remaining embryos don't give us another child.

BW