A team of doctors at Johns Hopkins University completed a penis transplant on a Navy corpsman, shining a light on an unseen wound that haunts many wounded combat veterans.
The corpsman, who told the MIT Technology Review to call him Ray, lost both legs in 2013. While he was proud to wear shorts and show off his prosthetic legs, almost no one knew he also lost his genitals in the blast.
His hidden injury haunted him for years. He turned to a team of doctors at Johns Hopkins led by Dr. Richard Redett to see what was medically possible. “When I heard they wanted to do it, I felt this huge sigh of relief,” Ray told MIT, later adding, “I could go back to being normal again.”
It took time to find a medical match for the transplant, but when the call finally came for Ray, he dropped everything and underwent the 14-hour procedure. Redett’s team described the painstaking process of completing such a procedure. Not only did Ray receive the donor’s penis, but he also underwent a scrotum transplant as well as receiving tissue from the thigh and abdomen.
The doctors completed the transplant from the inside out, starting with the urethra, nerves, arteries, and veins and ending with the skin. “The threads are smaller than a human hair,” Redett told MIT. “Unless you’re under a ’scope, you can’t really even see it.” Redett’s team completed the procedure and after five additional hours of surgery, Ray’s transplant was successful.
Veterans like Ray are not uncommon. As many as 1367 American veterans suffered a loss of their genitals following an attack, and the problem of genital loss is a new one facing this generation of soldiers. In the past, severe injuries such as the one Ray suffered, resulted in death.
For today’s servicemen, an injury to their genitals is a top fear.
“As soon as they wake up, they’re not asking about where their legs are,” Timothy Tausch, director of trauma and male reconstructive urology at Walter Reed told MIT. “They’re asking where the testicles and the penis are. You can’t put a number on how significantly this affects one of these wounded warriors’ lives.”
Mark Litynski explained in an interview with HuffPost that he and his wife had considered freezing his sperm in case anything happened but ended up deciding against it.
When Litynski was wounded in 2010, he was forced to make the heartbreaking call to his wife that he had saved his penis but lost his testicles, putting their dreams of genetic children to an end. “When I found out, I started crying, but very quickly I got over it because you’re just so glad they’re alive and doing well,” Litynski’s wife, Heather, said.
Thoughts about future relationships and the possibility of children weigh heavily on soldiers suffering from such injuries.
For Ray, his medical team at Johns Hopkins declined to complete a testicular transplant. Ethically, Redett didn’t think it was right to transplant sperm producing organs because future children would have the donor’s medical code — something the donor had not consented to prior to death.
Litynski accepted that his children will not have his DNA. “It’s disappointing, but we will still have kids — some way we will have kids, and I will look at them as if they had my DNA. It’s not that traumatic to me, as long as we’re still able to raise kids, it doesn’t necessarily matter where they came from,” he told HuffPost.
While Litynski had Heather by his side, not all soldiers are so lucky. Marine Staff Sgt. Glen Silva’s girlfriend took off while he was recovering in Walter Reed. “Who’s going to want to be with me now?’’ he asked.
Silva hasn’t sought out a transplant, as Litynski and Ray did. “I ain’t going to no sex-change doctor. I could do better with Silly Putty,” he said.
Ray still doesn’t talk about his transplant publicly, but he hopes it will give other veterans like Silva hope and the confidence to seek out the procedure.
“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,” he said. “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.”
