Doctors in South Africa are currently soliciting for penis donations from men in order to be able to carry out penis transplant on some awaiting patients in a hospital.
This is coming up days after the country emerged the first in the world to carry out a successful penis transplant on a 21-year-old man.
South African doctors say that they are now able and ready to perform penis transplants in all of the hospitals across their nation.
The country broke medical records for the second time when a 21-year-old man recently got a new penis after a nine-hour operation performed last December at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town.
The first was Dr Christiaan Barnard’s successful heart transplant in 1967.
Professor Frank Graewe, one of the doctors who performed the procedure and head of the division of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stellenbosch University, said the recipient of the penis transplant was one of several men on the waiting list, City Press reports.
According to the doctors, his penis was severed some three years ago after a botched attempt on circumcising him during a traditional initiation ceremony.
Graewe disclosed that the patient was doing just great to the point that he had sex five weeks after the surgery and it turned out great.
He said, “It’s now three months later and the patient is recovering very well. He had sex five weeks after the operation.
“He gets good quality erections, ejaculates and has frequent sex with his partner. He is in a steady and healthy relationship.”
The experts revealed that the penis was harvested in a two-hour procedure from a dead donor. The whole penis was carefully dissected to keep blood vessels and nerves intact.
Graewe says the skin tone of the donor penis is similar to that of the patient.
“It will never be 100% similar, because even when the individuals have the same skin colour, complexions differ.”
He says they will take this aspect into account in future.
In the meantime, the patient is currently on immune suppression medication to prevent his body from rejecting the penis, adding that few other patients were already lined up for subsequent transplants which will commence as soon as a donor is found.
“We wanted to first learn from the first transplant and the patient. We wanted to allow enough time for recovery. But he is recovering so well we can do the next transplant as soon as we’ve found a suitable donor,” he said.
