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In all likelihood, if you're looking for a new penis, it's because yours got chopped off.Why yes, my penis did get chopped off, but honestly I felt a little self-conscious about saying it.
There's no need to be self-conscious about your severed penis! People get their dicks chopped off all the time, especially in rural South Africa, where it's estimated that 250 men get de-penised each year, usually due to botched circumcisions. According to Richard Santucci, a reconstructive urologist who has seen a "non-zero number" of penisless patients at the South African hospital where the transplant took place, circumcision is not considered a medical procedure but instead an initiation ritual in which a boy must be circumcised by a village elder before he can become a man."You'd think the guy who did the circumcision would be good at it," Santucci tells me, "but they're apparently very bad at it, and they often use ritual knives which are very dull." Despite multiple protestations on the part of the South African government, the villages refuse to use scalpels and instead stick with the inefficient and often unclean ritual knives.
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Can you or a friend retrieve your penis? If so, good news! According to a 1993 New York Times article about penis reattachment, penis tissue can survive for as long as 18 hours as long as it's kept cool. "[Reattachment] is a fairly common problem," Santucci says, "and it's not half as difficult as a transplant." If you can retrieve your severed penis and put it on ice until you can get to the hospital, then you'll probably be fine… well, fine-ish."Technically, it's not that tough," Santucci says of reattaching a penis. "You put the urethra back together, you put the corpora (the part that helps you get an erection) back together, and a plastic surgeon puts the fine artery and nerves back together." Still, don't just go around cutting your penis off like it's some party trick. Santucci warns that reattachment "doesn't always give you the penis function you had before."
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Well, it looks like you're going to need someone else's, in which case, you get a penis from the same place you get any other organ: a donor. But you're going to have to wait for the right cadaver with a skin color that matches yours so you don't look weird naked.OK, I've got a penis. How do I get it reattached?
At this point, attaching a transplant penis is fairly similar to putting someone's penis back on them. Urethra, corpora, arteries, nerves, etc. The real problem pops up afterwards, when you're going to have to take up to 37 medications that Santucci says "have crazy side effects." Why? Well, your body is smart, and it can tell when there's something attached to it that's not… it. The human body, Santucci says, "has this amazing system that's supposed to fight the 'faux.'" In other words, "It's supposed to attack and destroy things that are not you." To combat that, you have to take medication to trick your body into thinking the penis it was born with is attached to it.On top of all the medication, Santucci tells me, you're going to need a "little luck." He explains, "The blood vessels to the penis are never very good. If you've got some inflammation or some narrowing, it could easily clot off and die."Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.