While we like to laugh and make joke about penises, they can be very important to a man’s identity and sense of virility—making the loss of a penis due to combat deeply scarring on both a physical and psychological level.
Now, male combat veterans who have suffered such a tragic loss have new hope as the first-ever penis transplant for a wounded warrior has been scheduled to happen within the next year, according to a report from the New York Times.
The procedure has been performed and documented twice before: in an unsuccessful attempt in China in 2006 and during a successful operation performed in 2014. The upcoming operation will be performed by doctors from Johns Hopkins University on a veteran in his 20s who was injured by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan.
“These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often,” Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee, the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, told the Times. “I think one would agree it is as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a young man to come home in his early 20s with the pelvic area completely destroyed.”
The operation will involve a donor penis from a recently deceased patient. Doctors will attempt to stitch together the essential nerves and blood vessels under a microscope in the hopes that these connections will result in a working appendage. Risks of the operation include bleeding and infection. The patient will also need to take medicine needed to prevent transplant rejection; however, that medicine also increases the risk of developing cancer.
The Johns Hopkins doctors have permission to perform 60 of these types of transplants, and Lee said patients should expect to regain 100 percent of the function of their original penis. He added that the doctors will give recipients a range of expectations.
“Some hope to father children,” Lee said. “I think that is a realistic goal.”
If transplant recipients still have their testicles, any children they father will the new penis will be theirs genetically. Injured individuals who have lost their testes will not be able to father their own child.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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