Surgeon who incidentally cut his patient’s penis off ordered to pay 500,000 euros

A court has ordered a Romanian surgeon to pay EUR 500,000 (US$795,000) in compensation to a patient whose penis he accidentally severed during an operation.

Photo: Surgeon who incidentally cut his patient’s penis off ordered to pay 500,000 euros

In July 2004, Dr. Naum Ciomu made a surgical error while operating on the man's testicles, severing the penis instead of making an incision to the testicle.

The Bucharest Magistrates Court ruled Friday that Ciomu had been "superficial" in his approach to the operation, ordered the fine and handed Ciomu a one-year suspended prison sentence. The ruling can be appealed.

A piece of muscle from the man's arm has now been attached to where his penis was, but its function is aesthetic.

"You don't have to be an expert to realize that the 33-year-old victim does not have a good state of mind," said Mihai Olariu, the victim's lawyer.

Pravda.ru previously reported about a different kind of surgery, when doctors implanted the new penis to a man who lost his reproductive organ during military actions in Chechnya.

Lieutenant Alexei previously was fighting in Chechnya. On the way to the base after a successful military operation, he encountered the wire attached to grenade. The story happened in 2004.

”After the blast I regained consciousness in the military hospital”, says Alexei. “Then the doctor started examining me. He folded the blanket aside, and I discovered with horror that I had only one testicle left from my genitals. The doctors explained that this meant I still could be a father, but I could not believe it”.

Alexei told this after being operated. He started walking, and all his trouble seems to remain in the past.

Before the surgery, Director of the Center of Medical Surgery Mikhail Sokolshikov invited the reporter to watch it, and described the details of the plan to retrieve Alexei’s penis:

”Alexei came to our Center four months after he left the military hospital. The young man had no penis, scrotum and right testicle. Luckily, the hospital surgeons managed to save his left testicle. It was sown under the skin of his groin. This maintained the normal level of hormones and gave the man the chance to have children in future, provided that the means of delivery of spermatozoon will be created.

We are planning to recreate the penis and urethra. We will form scrotum from the patient’s own tissue, put the left testicle inside along with prosthetic device for another testicle”.

The reporter:

“After being brought In the surgery room, I was surprised to see that Alexei’s body was marked with blue soft-tip all over. From Alexei’s arm tissue surgeon Alexei Sokolshikov created pipe-shaped imitation of the penis having urethra. Then the man’s wound area was prepared for transplantation. With the use of the microscope, the vessels of the transplant and the man’s perineum were sown together.

"The remained part of the man’s urethra was connected with the new urethra. No coitus is possible without axis firmness of new phallus, to create this firmness, two silicone prosthetic devices were inserted into the penis.

"Seeing this magic operation, I can confirm: after the surgery wounds are healed, nobody will say that this penis is artificial."

After the surgery, it was hard for Alexei to believe that he had become a valid man again. He said he urinated like a man and felt no pain or discomfort. ”I wake up at night several times in terror: what if I don’t have the “man’s pride”. I touch my penis, relax and sleep again. Before the surgery, I wanted to commit suicide. When being in the military hospital, I envied a young soldier who had no legs, but had his penis."