Surgeons Construct New Penis for Cancer-Stricken Man

June 17, 2005 — -- The patient was lucky. They had caught the cancer early. But to keep it from spreading, the doctors would have to remove his penis. Though the surgery had saved his life, the disfigurement was crippling him socially and emotionally.

"I love to hunt. I love to fish. I love to golf," said the patient, who asked to remain anonymous. But now, unable to urinate while standing up, the patient gave up his hobbies rather than be seen squatting behind the trees. He could no longer be intimate with his wife and took to going to bed only after she had fallen asleep.

But the final blow came one day when he was changing in a men's locker room at a water park. A little boy began pointing at his groin and the boy's father joined in laughing. "It was humiliating," the man recalled in his slow Texas drawl. "I couldn't get out of that locker room fast enough."

The 63-year-old began looking for a plastic surgeon who could reconstruct his penis. "I went to 12 urologists," he said. "They all said, 'It can't be done, it can't be done.'"

The shame was taking its toll, and the man had grown depressed. Concerned about his patient, the man's physician managed to track down two doctors who might be able to help: a plastic surgeon, Dr. Gordon Lee, and a urologist, Dr. Erin Bird, at Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas.

After hearing the patient's story, the doctors decided to try some inventive techniques to reconstruct the man's penis.

Dr. Garry Brody, a plastic surgeon at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, calls his profession an art. "Because plastic surgery by its very nature must correct an almost infinite variety of defects and deformities," he explained, "we must have a bag full of variations."

Lee and Bird began using every variation in the book.

Because of his previous amputation, the patient did not have a urethra long enough to allow him to urinate while standing up. "I fully value the complaints of women who say there aren't enough commodes," he said.