An American soldier injured in an IED attack has regained near-normal functions more than a year after receiving the world’s first penis and scrotum transplant.
The army veteran, who uses the pseudonym Ray, said he was "feeling whole".
He was operated on in March 2018 at the pioneering John Hopkins School of Medicine. He had been injured while serving in Afghanistan in 2010.
On Thursday his medical team reported that Ray’s life has been transformed by the surgery.
“He has near-normal erections and the ability to achieve orgasm,” they wrote, in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
They said that Ray can also urinate standing up and without straining, “with the urine discharged in a strong stream.”
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Richard James Redett III, a professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the hospital, told NBC News: “It’s the first time he’s felt normal in a long time.”
Penis transplantation is described in the MIT Technology Review as “a radical frontier of modern medicine: extremely rare, expensive, and difficult to perform. Grafting a penis from a deceased donor onto a living recipient is a chaotic amalgamation that entails stitching millimeters-wide blood vessels and nerves with minuscule sutures.”
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Ray spoke to the publication last month, telling them that despite losing his legs in the incident, he kept his genital injuries a secret.
His was the first penis and scrotum transplant, and only the fourth penis transplant ever undertaken. It was also by far the most complicated. The 14-hour operation involved a team of around 35 doctors.
Curtis Cetrulo, a Massachusetts transplant surgeon who in 2016 performed the first penis transplant in the United States, called Ray’s operation “a real quantum leap.”
Ray will probably have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life, which could put him at risk of infections, kidney problems and certain types of cancer.
However, he told the MIT Review that agreeing to the transplant was “one of the best decisions I ever made.”
He continued: “This surgery was a way for me to overcome that little subconscious voice or whatever it was that would always keep me feeling different from everyone else.
“It was one of those injuries that really stresses you out and you think, ‘Why would I keep going?’
“I guess I always just kept this real hope that there’s an answer out there.”
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