When Mississippi resident Mike Moore was 7 years old, he had a circumcision that went all kinds of wrong. The doctor who performed the circumcision used the wrong machine and Moore ended up with a painful infection. He was rushed back to the hospital in pain. "The last thing I can remember is talking to the anesthesiologist. When I woke up, it was gone," he says. Most of his penis had been amputated. I can't even imagine how traumatizing that must have been for him as a child. For years he battled depression and low self-confidence. He wondered if he would ever find a wife that would accept him the way he is or be able to have a family.
This story makes me cry tears of joy because Moore who is now 30, may possibly be the first man EVER to have fathered a child naturally after having penile reconstructive surgery.
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Given his difficult history it is nothing short of a medical miracle that Mike Moore is now the doting father to a 6-month-old little boy named Memphis. Thanks to the help of Dr. Gordon Lee, director of microsurgery at Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, California, Moore was able to impregnate his wife Heather Moore naturally, who by the way sounds like an amazing human being. "She accepted me for who I was, and not for what was wrong with me," Moore says of his 25-year-old wife. "She continues to this day to assure me that there's nothing wrong."
Moore had tried penile reconstructive surgery using arm tissue, before coming across Dr. Lee, but the procedures failed. Moore was ready to give up, but his uncle happened to see a piece on TV about Dr. Lee who was pioneering a procedure that used thigh tissue instead of arm tissue to reconstruct the penis. In 2007, Moore went under the knife one more time. It was a painful procedure, but once the healing was done, it worked.
Amazing. Now he has a wife who loves him wholeheartedly and a beautiful baby boy. The baby didn't come immediately, the couple who married in 2012 had to try for months and were advised to consider artificial insemination. But one day Heather came into the room and said to her hubby, "We're pregnant." Isn't that awesome? My heartfelt congratulations to both of them.
I also want to commend him for telling his story publicly. He spent years being taunted and shamed because of his condition. He says that to this day there are still people who want to make fun of him. I'm glad he's telling his story because I'm sure it will help someone else who is in a similar situation.
Of course Dr. Lee deserves many accolades for his work. After consulting colleagues and scouring medical journals, Dr. Lee says, "To my knowledge, there are no reports of a patient who had a completely reconstructed penis that has been able to conceive in this fashion."
Image via Corbis Images, NBCBayArea.com
