U.S. war veteran gets penis transplant

Mangalore Today News Network

Apr 26, 2018: In a 14-hour operation, a young military veteran whose genitals were blown off by a bomb received an extraordinary transplant: a penis, scrotum and portion of the abdominal wall, taken from a deceased organ donor.

The surgery, performed last month at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the most complex and extensive penis transplant to date, and the first performed on a combat veteran maimed by a blast.

Two other successful penis transplants have been performed — in South Africa in 2014 and at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016 — but they involved only the organ itself, not the scrotum or surrounding flesh. The patient at Johns Hopkins is just one of many soldiers whose lives were shattered in a split second when they stepped on hidden bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. He lost both legs above the knee, but the genital damage was even more devastating to him.

“That injury, I felt like it banished me from a relationship,” he said. “Like, that’s it, you’re done, you’re by yourself for the rest of your life. I struggled with even viewing myself as a man for a long time.” But now, four weeks after the surgery, he said, “I feel whole again.”

He asked that his name not be published, because of the stigma associated with genital injuries. Except for his immediate family and a few close friends, he has told no one about the nature of his wounds, he said.

W.P. Andrew Lee, chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, said the goal of this type of transplant is “to restore a person’s sense of identity”. For most men, that means regaining the ability to urinate while standing up and to have sex. Dr. Lee thinks transplantation can make both possible, though healing and nerve regeneration will take time. Urination is expected first, within a few months.

Nerves grow from the recipient into the transplant at the rate of about 1 inch a month. “We’re hopeful we can restore sexual function in terms of spontaneous erection and orgasm,” Dr. Lee said.

Although the scrotum was transplanted, the donor’s testes had been removed for ethical reasons: Keeping them might enable the recipient to father children that belonged genetically to the organ donor, something not considered acceptable by medical guidelines.NY TIMES