A mentally ill man who intentionally cut his penis off during a suicide attempt was able to have erections six weeks after surgeons reattached his penis.
After a psychotic episode in which he chopped his penis with a kitchen knife, the 34-year-old from Birmingham was found unconscious at his house.
The British Medical Journal Case Reports released disturbing photos exposing his injuries.
The anonymous patient had self-inflicted stab wounds on many regions of his body and was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
His penis was iced and carried in the ambulance with him to University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
His penis had been separated from his body for 23 hours by the time he was resuscitated and brought into the operating theater.
Previous case studies have revealed that the penis must be replanted within 15 hours for the procedure to be successful.
A 34-year-old mentally ill guy from Birmingham was able to obtain erections barely six weeks after surgeons reattached his penis after a suicide attempt.
To get blood flowing again, doctors reattached the severed portion of his penis to the stump and removed a vein from the patient’s arm.
A catheter was placed in the patient’s bladder to assist him in urinating.
He was admitted to a general ward and started on antibiotics before being moved to a mental unit two weeks later.
After discharge, the catheter was kept in for a month, and his penis was cleansed daily with antiseptics to avoid infection.
‘Six weeks after surgery, the patient reported a restoration of feeling to the penis as well as spontaneous erection,’ the authors said in the report.
After the skin on the shaft of his penis began to deteriorate, he received a skin transplant a few months later. It’s unknown if the patient will need more skin transplants in the future.
It was the first reported example of punitive reattachment so long after amputation, according to the doctors.
The team hopes that it will inspire other doctors to try reattachment surgery, even if the penis has been detached from the body for a long time.
‘Given the importance of the resected organ, replantation was tried in this case despite the extended warm and total ischemia duration, which is the longest in the literature,’ they explained.
‘The success of this case should thus inspire surgeons to undertake penile replantation, even with extended ischemia (loss of blood flow), due to the possibility of success and the physical and emotional repercussions of organ loss on the patient.’
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