A boy who was born with two penises had to have one removed – but doctors chose to take the larger one.
The youngster, from Brazil, is one in a million baby boys to be born with a duplicated penis.
Doctors in São Paulo said to date only 100 men with the condition, called diphallia, have been reported in medical literature.
They describe their own case report in the Journal of Pediatric Urology of a boy who had two penises that lay side by side.
He had “complete” diphallia, as opposed to having only an “accessory” penis or stump.
The unnamed patient was two years old by the time he had surgery for reasons that were not explained.
Observing that the left penis was larger, the team of doctors had planned to save this one and get rid of the smaller, right member.
Both penises, although differing in size, were visibly similar and working.
The mom said that both penises had the ability to become erect.
But examinations showed each penis had only one of two corpora cavernosa – spongy columns of tissues that fill with blood and cause the penis to harden.
Medics discovered that the boy could only urinate from the smaller penis, confirmed by the mother.
The urethra of the larger one was too narrow for urine to pass through, MailOnline reported.
Therefore, a decision was made on “functionality and not on size” – meaning the larger penis had to go.
Surgeons removed the left penis entirely and filmed the process in a video published in the online journal.
Before and after shots show how neatly the Brazilian team were able to slice the left penis off and stitch the remaining skin together.
It is not clear how well the boy will be able to achieve erections in the future, given he only has one erection chamber in his remaining penis.
It comes after doctors in Uzbekistan described the case of a seven-year-old boy with two fully functional penises.
Both penises had urethras and erectile tissue.
But the case report, published in Urology Case Reports, did not explicitly say whether both penises would be able to become erect.
It’s also not clear why it took the patient’s parents seven years to get the condition treated, with medics eventually removing one of the shafts.
According to MedicalNewsToday, there is nothing to say that men with duplicate penises can’t have a normal sex life and children.
However, there tends to be a higher risk of dysfunction in the kidney and colorectal systems, and therefore infection and possibly death.
Therefore, it is deemed appropriate to remove one of the penises and correct any abnormalities on the insides, too.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.