Bambi Eloriaga-Amago
But if those two lost and regained their manhood, a boy in India was born with one too many.
Last month, a boy born with three penises was operated on at Sion Hospital in Mumbai, India. Experts call the boy’s case the rarest of the rare. He was suffering from a condition called Diphalia, and as the name suggests, it is when a boy is born with two penises. But in the Indian boy’s case, he was born with three, an extremely rare anomaly, with only a hundred such occurrences mentioned in medical case files since 1609.
The boy, now aged two, could only pass urine through one of them, while only two had functioning erectile tissue, and the third being merely rudimentary. He was also born with no anus.
In a surgery that lasted for six hours, the Mumbai doctors excised the rudimentary penis, as well as the soft mass where the penises were attached.
“The two functional penises were fused into one, by wrapping a mass of skin around them. Further, an anal path was created through the boy’s rectum to facilitate the passage of excreta,” explained Dr. Vishesh Dixit, a pediatric surgeon at Sion.
Doctors believe that sexual functions will be normal and the boy’s fertility will not be affected once he reaches adulthood.
The boy’s family couldn’t be happier, says one of his uncles: “We want our boy to lead a normal life, and are grateful to the doctors who have conducted a successful surgery.”
