Editor’s Note: This story originally ran in the University of South Florida’s paper, The Oracle.
A 17-year-old boy may have felt a little prick when surgeons completed the world’s first penis reduction surgery.
The operation was pioneered at the University of South Florida by urologist Dr. Rafael Carrion, director of USF’s Sexual Medicine Program. The patient reportedly complained that his penis was getting in the way of living a normal life, whether playing sports, having intercourse or wearing non-baggy pants in public.
“There comes a time in every urologist’s career that a patient makes a request so rare and impossible to comprehend that all training breaks down and leaves the physician speechless,” Carrion told The Daily Mail.
Results and findings of the surgery were published in November in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, in a paper titled “The Reduction Corporoplasty: The Answer to the Improbable Urologic Question ‘Can You Make My Penis Smaller?’”
The boy’s penis, while flaccid, measured seven inches in length and 10 inches in circumference — comparable to the shape of a football and size of a grapefruit.
Though the boy was able to achieve orgasm through masturbation, he was unable to complete intercourse, according to the paper published in the medical journal.
The boy reported that, during the several times he attempted intercourse, his partner complained of discomfort due to the penis’ girth.
The Daily Mail article stated this anomalous case is the result of the boy’s sickle cell anemia, which blocked the flow to penile blood vessels leading to long-lasting and highly painful erections that eventually deformed the penis. When the boy got an erection, his penis reportedly got firmer but not longer.
“It sounds like a man’s dream — a tremendously inflated phallus,” Carrion told The Daily Mail, “but unfortunately, although it was a generous length, its girth was just massive, especially around the middle.”
Having no precedent to base the procedure on, Carrion and a team of surgeons bypassed the urethra and the sensation nerves, cut along the circumcision scar, unwrapped the skin and removed tissue from both sides of the penis.
“It’s slightly longer and slightly thicker than the average male, but now it looks symmetrical,” Carrion told The Daily Mail.
The patient spent two days in the hospital after the surgery, according to The Daily Mail, and was “ecstatic” with his new penis.
Since the paper describing the surgery was published, Carrion reported being asked to perform the surgery by one other patient.
“These are controversial waters we’re stepping in,” Carrion told The Daily Mail. “Who is to judge what is a legitimate complaint and what isn’t?”
