Page 18 - IAV Digital Magazine #449

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“I feel WholeAgain:” WoundedVet Receives First Penis-scrotumComboTransplant
By Beth Mole
A young military vet- eran severely maimed by an impro- vised explosive device (IED) received a transplant of a large section of tissue, including the penis, scrotum, and a por- tion of the abdominal wall, from a
deceased organ donor, according to The New York Times.
The 14-hour opera- tion took place at Johns Hopkins Hospital last month. It marks the third suc- cessful penis trans- plant and the first complex penis trans- plant, which is to say it involved the scro- tum and surrounding tissue as well as the penis. For ethical rea- sons, surgeons removed the testicles prior to the transplan- tation to prevent the possibility that the recipient could father children genetically belonging to the donor.
Though doctors expect his recovery and nerve regrowth to take some time, they’re hopeful that the patient will even-
tually recover the ability to urinate and have spontaneous erections and orgasms. In fact, they expect urination to be possible within a few months.
The patient, who wished to remain anonymous due to the stigma, told
the Times: “I feel whole again.” The IED took both of his legs above the knee and destroyed his genitals. But it was the genital injury that hit him hardest, he said. “That injury, I felt like it banished me from a relation- ship. 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.”
He now has plans to go to medical school, settle down, and meet someone. “Just that normal stuff,” he said.
Prior to his operation, the experimental transplantation proce- dure involved only the penis. The first successful such transplant took place in 2014 in South Africa, and in 2016, a Boston man became the second penis
transplant recipient— the first in the US— after he lost his penis to cancer.
But for years, a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins has been working to provide the life-changing transplant to young military
veterans returning from war with devas- tating injuries.
“I think one would agree it is as devas- tating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a young man to come home in his early 20s with the pelvic area completely
destroyed,” Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, said in 2015.
It’s unclear how many veterans are in need of such a transplant. From 2001 to 2013, 1,367 men, nearly all under the age of 35, returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan with genital injuries, according to the Department of Defense Trauma reg- istry. Of those, 31 percent involved injuries to the penis and 20 percent of those penile injuries were categorized as severe, according to the Times. Back in 2015, Johns Hopkins had given its doc- tors permission to pursue 60 trans- plants.
For this first trans- plant at Johns Hopkins, which Lee estimated to cost $300,000 to $400,000, the team of surgeons and urol- ogists worked for free. They hope that the Department of Defense will pick up the tab for future transplants.
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