What part of “circumcision” was unclear? That’s basically what a Kentucky man and his wife are asking of two doctors who cut off the man’s penis while he was under the knife. The doctors say they discovered cancer and made an emergency decision. The man says, dude, wtf, you cut off my penis. It doesn’t grow back, and it was kind of important to me.
The lawsuit states that Patterson received consent to perform a circumcision and only a circumcision, and that Seaton did not consent to his penis being removed.
Kevin George, the plaintiff’s attorney, said [Dr.] Patterson amputated the organ after finding cancer, but he only had consent to remove the foreskin.
“Sometimes you have an emergency and you have to do this, but he could very easily closed him up and said, ‘Here are your options. You have cancer,’ and the family would have said, ‘We want a second opinion. This is a big deal,’” George said.
We’ve just made a new note to self: if we ever have surgery, we intend to grab the doctor by the collar and say vigorously to him, “No matter what happens, don’t you cut off my penis.” Who knew you had to worry about that sort of thing.
Watch the video report on the story at WLKY.com.
“Man Sues Doctors After Penis Amputated” [WLKY] (Thanks to Jay!)
(Photo: Getty)
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I am betting that they messed up and botched the circumcision (which is bad enough if done properly) but then tried to avoid a huge lawsuit by claiming cancer.
a doctor willing to do circumcisions on infants has already lost all sense of the hippocratic oath and ethics so it’s not a stretch to find them hurting a patient to keep their malpractice down
I worked for five years in a pathology lab for a regional medical center, and this was pretty much the standard protocol: If the surgeon found cancer, the most invasive ethical procedure would be a quick biopsy and a stat call to the pathology lab, which would have made a diagnosis. If any sort of cancer was found, the patient should have been sewn back up, circumcised or not, allowed to awaken from anesthesia, and been allowed to make an informed decision.
If cancer was found, where are the pathology reports?
No joke, I was let the cancer kill me before I removed my penis.
On the bright side, the dude is going to save a bloody fortune from no longer having to buy condoms.
Oh. Wait. Was “bloody” the wrong adjective to use?
I’m genuinely shocked – shocked! – that someone hasn’t already:
okay, nobody has the right to cut your penis off without your consent. even if he did have cancer and couldn’t live without it, he has to first see that cancer, and make the choice to have it cut off. you cannot have that decision made for you. i hope he wins in court, that would be justice.
On top of financial damages, I think we should bring up some old school punishment… CHOP OFF THE SURGEONS’ WANGS!
@NarutoSoul: Maybe the surgeon could be a wang transplant donor.
@CatMoran: Even better, seeing as TWO docs were responsible, combine them into a SUPER FRANKENWANG for the victim. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Wouldn’t cancer in the penis be kinda good? I mean it would make it bigger and such.
Also, maybe this will finally answer the question of how much money would it take to cut off your penis.
I choose death before dishonor. I want my cancerous junk to be 6′ under with me…
Actually, this sort of thing happens often, just not usually with the penis. It’s quite common for surgeons to set about doing one procedure, but to do another one once they see the spread of a tumor or something else life-threatening (or simply something that makes sense for them to do). For example, during exploratory surgery, appendectomies are often carried out.
Inexcusable. A few hours wait would have made no difference, I am betting that there is something else going on here and someone is covering their asses.
C’mon people, not everyone is hung like a horse; maybe the circumcision and the penis amputation where one in the same?
According to past comments, the only medical reason you would need a circumcision for is if the penis could not extend past the forskin–imagine a kid who fell asleep inside a sleeping bag with no zipper, grew up, and couldn’t get out of the bag any more. The doc wouldn’t be able to see the kids feet to tell he had frostbite untill he cut the bag open.
Intelligent Design = Fail because the foreskin has no zipper.
If he has been married longer than 10 years he don’t need it anymore.
@OnceWasCool: Ouch, baby – very ouch!
While general anesthesia isn’t required, and you only need a local, I would want the general anesthesia. I just can’t imagine being awake watching someone cut ANYTHING off my penis, foreskin or not.
“penile carcinoma (rare in US, incredibly prevalent in other countries where newborn circumcision is uncommon)”
Not true. The totally unnecessary practice of newborn circumcision is rare in Europe, but Europe has similar penile cancer rates to the US.
I’m surprised that,. as a urologist, you would be so poorly informed.
hmmm detachable penis
They didnt even need to wake him up if his wife was nearby, thats what next of kins are for. “Hey we found canser if your husband’s penis and if we dont take it off, he’ll die, sign here please”
She signs, no big deal.
My guess is that the surgeon will turn out to have drug problems. Or a previously diagnosed mental disorder. Or both.
What I immediately thought of was the case in NYC many years back where the obstetrician carved his initials into the patient’s belly after delivering her baby via caesarian:
[query.nytimes.com]
“The state also cited the clinic for not thoroughly checking Dr. Zarkin’s credentials and for allowing him to perform surgery unsupervised even though a psychiatrist had told clinic officials that Dr. Zarkin had a brain disorder.”
If they gave me the choice “your penis or you die” I will choose DEATH!
Basically, they DIDN’T have the right. It was a poor medical decision on the doctor’s part, and will have financial consequences for the doctor and the hospital. Not to mention the life-changing consequences for the poor patient. (Yes, I am male and yes, I am *extremely* sympathetic!)
Actually, my mother had a doctor forcibly remove her ovaries when she went in complaining about stomach cramps.
Her abdomen was scanned by a nurse, who immediately ran out to get a doctor. The doctor came in, took one look at the machine and said “we’ll have to operate!”
My mother said “ok, let me go get my planner so I can see when I’ll be free-”
“No, lay back, we’re going to operate” the doctor said, and stuck a mask over her face.
One of her ovaries ruptured on the operating table, if she had gone home she would have died.
Without knowledge of exactly what was happening inside this man’s penis, we can’t really say if the doctor made the right decision. There could have been a large cancerous mass about to intrude onto a large vein (which there are plenty in the penis) and if they hadn’t removed it, the cells could have entered his blood stream and gone straight to the heart, brain, and lungs.
As much as I hate the bills I get, I like to remember that doctors are in the business of saving lives, not performing service tasks.
@ManiacDan:
There could have been a large cancerous mass about to intrude onto a large vein (which there are plenty in the penis) and if they hadn’t removed it, the cells could have entered his blood stream and gone straight to the heart, brain, and lungs.
If this is true, I’m guessing that there would have been a detectable lump that would have been noticed hopefully by the patient or his wife, or by the doctor during a pre-op exam. There aren’t many places to hide in the penis.
And if this is true, it should be a simple matter to produce the penis and the cancerous mass. It doesn’t just go into the trash can. The doctor should easily be able to show what the problem was and why he thought it was life-threatening.
If it wasn’t life-threatening, then at a minimum the patient’s wife should have been informed and allowed to make a decision.
The importance of a penis (both as a functioning organ and to the patient’s mental health) is not a mystery. Even I know that, and I don’t have one. It’s not like the doctor just cut off a finger, but it’s ok, you have nine more.
Doctors are in the business of saving lives. They are also human beings and they make mistakes. If this doctor made a mistake in this case, it’s a whopper and at a minimum the patient deserves compensation, medical care, and a whole lot of mental health care. If the doctor didn’t make a mistake, the patient needs to understand why it was necessary.
@nsv: Completely agreed, if the doctor removed the penis because there was a little lump that maybe could have been cancer, he should never practice medicine again. I’m just trying to argue against the people who are so quick to assume that’s what happened. While it’s true the article makes no reference to the post-severed penis, we don’t know what happened to it so we can’t assume the cancer wasn’t about to kill him.
Though, I’ll admit, “deadly penis cancer” isn’t exactly top of the list of probabilities.
I’m having thoughts similar to ManiacDan on this one. What I’m thinking is the docs did the circumcision and found the cancer had been cut during the operation and putting things into a state where it was safe would have risked spreading the tumor.
The doctor isn’t going to want to stitch the tumor itself and they are not going to want to leave an area with no skin on it.
That’s some messed up junk.
That cancer was not going to kill him in one day. Absolutely they should have waited to discuss it with him. He might ultimately have decided it really was medically necessary, but that was so obviously his decision to make.
Sometimes doctors do have to make emergency decisions, but I can’t see this being one of them.
Dang, I guess I shouldn’t have tattooed a big black X on my penis.
There have actually been studies that show that circumcision helps prevent the contraction of HIV/AIDS.
@MelanieHyena:
Those studies involve people having unprotected sex in Africa. A foreskin is no substitute for a condom.
Furthermore, using studies like that to validate/encourage ritualized genital mutilation (ie, circumcision) is just as absurd as the original reasons used to promote circumcision in America, which was that it was thought to reduce/stop masturbation.
is this poor guy going to have to pee through a tube now for the rest of his life? Hopefully they can make him some sort of prosthetic that’s at least going to help with his mental stability even if it isn’t functional. I don’t know why we haven’t managed to grow peni yet, since we can grow ears on rats and such already.
Most men I know would rather die by cancer then lop that particular thing off, I know i’d feel the same if I had one. It sounds like someone made a big “Whoops” somewhere. Now this guy gets to live a life of strap ons. Eesh. There was no way to reattach it I wonder? There was a local story some years back about a woman who vindictively cut off her husband’s junk and i think they reattached it after fishing it out of the toilet or some stupid arsed thing.
@Yurei: Some amputated tissue can be reattached within a small window of time. Even assuming there’s nothing wrong with the penis, it’s still too late.
The #1 problem with penile cancer is delay in diagnosis. Most men are horrible about going to the doctor anyway, but faced with a problem with Mr. Happy, they frequently visit a river in Egypt called De-Nial.
I’ve had instances where I couldn’t adequately examine a patient’s penis because of bad phimosis. In those cases I’ve held involved discussions with the patient about performing a circumcision (sometimes under general anesthesia) with the possibility of removing part, or all of the penis if it looks like cancer. Sometimes the patient agrees to everything, sometimes they say “circumcision only.”
Point is, the doc should have gotten better Informed Consent. In its absence, he/she (there are female urologists, you chauvinist pigs!) should have come back to fight another day.
As far as urinating afterward, it depends on how much of the penis was amputated. If it was a partial then it may look, and function, not unlike an intact penis. If a total penectomy was performed, the urethra (tube running though penis) is brought out through an opening in the perineum (taint) and the man would have to pee sitting down.
Up until recently, many women went in to the hospital to get a biopsy and came out with double mastectomy…as a STANDARD practice. If any evidence of cancer was found at all, the women received a mastectomy.
Obviously I’m not saying that this man should have had his penis removed – clearly the doctor should have gotten consent from his wife at the very least. However, as a feminist, I think it’s important to point out that this man is coming from a point of privilege where he will be awarded a lot of money for this doctor’s mistake. Meanwhile, many women (who would now be in their 70s or 80s) were never compensated, apologized to, and had to live with the results for the rest of their lives. Doctors told them to be happy they were alive and not to worry about the scars, or their appearance. See a picture of scars here: [www.myselftogetheragain.org]
For example, read this woman’s story:
[www.livestrong.org]
And a nurse’s perspective.
“As a nurse, I learned that it was common practice in the late 60s and early 70s for a woman to go into surgery for the assessment of a breast lump not knowing whether or not her breast was still there when she awakened. During these years a survivor was asked to sign a consent form that stated if the biopsy was positive for cancer, the survivor may have a mastectomy.”
[www.cancerfacts.com]
@myfigurefemale:
Back in the day doctors did all sorts of crap like lobotomies, electroshock therapy, blood-letting, etc. This is not a feminist issue, since today a woman given a surprise mastectomy would likewise be able to sue. And then she would get a nice pair of artificial breasts, while this guy is in for much suffering.
And yeah, unless you’re cool with your husband cutting off your breasts–with a spoon–please don’t decide to cut of his penis if he is incapacitated. Don’t be that kind of feminist.
@orlo: Yes, in the earlier case it looks like that poor woman who went in for a C-section and had all limbs removed was able to sue.
I don’t think that he’s coming from privilege just because he’s a man. He’s lost something that, in our society, is held up as sacrosanct to his masculinity – just as breasts and ovaries are considered central to femininity. I think that’s one of the things feminism is about (at least it was for me) – that we’re not to be objectified by our bodies. But we all know men’s physical objectification is usually tied to their genitals.
And please, don’t even consider Lorena Bobbitt as a feminist – that’s just a stereotype. Folks like her and Valerie Solanas are more properly “misandrists”.
sounds like a cover up for a mistake
Thankfully this story wasn’t submitted by the OP as personal experience complete with “and now they won’t answer my phone calls”.
What good is life without your sex organ, anyway?
You know the guy’s wife slipped the doc a 100
They cut off his penis… My god this man deserves everything they can give him in compensation and to have the doctors penises removed.
How did they know it was a malignant cancer by eyeballing it?
I’ll have to say that exact thing to my doctor when I go in for laser eye surgery.
I’m assuming he was getting a circumcision due to cancer having something to do with his foreskin.
Otherwise I would agree with you. I’m not circumcised and don’t see a good reason for it other than medical complications.
Here’s what I don’t get… how is it that nobody knew he had cancer before he got on the operating table?
I’m not a surgeon, but I would expect before any operation there would be this thing called “an exam”? Shouldn’t that have turned up any abnormality severe enough to require amputation?
This reminds me of the David Reimer story! It’s such a sad story.
Surely the best thing to do if they found this was wake the guy, talk to him, get a decision, THEN go cutting up his meat and two veg. I doubt a day would have made a huge difference.
Holy crap you don’t go cutting that off people that’s just not cricket.
Just a reminder folks. This is not a circumcision debate thread. Keep your comments on topic and relevant to the original article.
Off topic comments may garner you a warning or worse.
This is not your daddy’s skins game.
Ahh Kentucky! I moved here a couple years ago and have to admit I enjoy a lot of the odd happenings of the area. It’s a state that is known for bourbon and yet 50% of the counties are dry. In my county (Hardin) you actually have to drink and drive, since the only place you can buy booze is in a restaurant or winery. Every major road that leads to the next county has a liquor store right at the county line, always with a constant stream of people going to and fro.
It’s also a state that takes the “we don’t need no driver’s training” approach, and as a result has people that stop at random, run through stops, yield to yellow or red cars, think that the middle and left lanes of I-65 are their god-given place, and that the turn signal is the mark of the beast.
When I hear anti-democratic opinions down here, 80% of them are because “Obama is the antichrist” rather than any worldly reasons.
Finally, Kentucky is not “Southern”. It was barely touched by the conferderates, is in the middle of the country, and generally fits in more as a midwest state. However, just try explaining that to people down here. The best logic I’ve found to support that Kentucky is Southern is that they serve sweet tea almost everywhere.
That said, people are generally nice. The weather is pleasant, there’s lots of country side (with only 4 real cities in the state–Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, and Paducah), and the land can be gorgeous.
Come to visit, but I don’t know if you’d really want to stay.
I’m an organ donor so if he’s lucky I’ll croak soon and he can have my junk. Maybe HE can put it to good use. whakawhaka
Sorry, should have said “some” other countries. But the fact of the matter is penile cancer accounts for only abuot 0.5% of all cancers in men in the US. In some Asian. African, and South American countries it represents 10%. That’s a 20X increase in prevalence. In medical terms, like that show from the 80s, “That’s incredible!”
See, I’m not as poorly informed as you thought ;-
Hmmm, mixed feelings here. Several things to say: 1. Penile carcinoma is a squamous cell carcinoma, is often very aggressive, and does carry a high mortality rate especially when it’s not appropriately treated when discovered. 2. Penile carcinoma almost only occurs in NON circumsized men, which makes a very GOOD case for circumcision imo. 3. The argument could be made that the surgeons, acting as patient advocate, had his best interests in heart when they cut out his deadly cancer (and rest assured the tissue was sent to the pathologist so the cancer can be verified I’m sure). 4. Another argument could (and I’m certain WILL) be made that it wouldn’t have taken but 10-20 extra minutes of time to wake up the patient, inform him of the discovery, then get his permission to proceed, thus avoiding the whole malpractice thing.
However, in the end, with a positive pathology report, the case is not likely to win, no matter how horrific you may think it is to have your johnson cut off. Just imagine how much MORE horrific to watch it ROT off from cancer, which then spreads to your entire body, from whence you emaciate, rot, THEN die.
Hmmmm, interesting, and tough, case.