Man amputates penis and stores it in a jar after taking 'heroic' dose of magic mushrooms
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16:49 BST 30 Sep 2024, updated 17:27 BST 30 Sep 2024By Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com
A man on vacation in Austria who took 'magic mushrooms' entered psychosis that led him to amputate his penis and store it in a snow-filled jar.
Doctors are calling the first case of its kind and a harrowing reminder of the dangers of psychedelic drugs.
The 37-year-old ate four or five mushrooms at around 9pm before blacking out and taking an axe to his penile shaft and chopping it into several pieces.
As he came to, he staggered out of the home and dragged himself down a nearby street, bleeding profusely, searching for help.
A passerby picked him up at 2 a.m., brought him to the nearest village, and took the man to the closest hospital.
He was immediately carted to the operating room, where doctors got the bleeding under control and disinfected the myriad pieces of the man’s penis in the snow and soil-filled jar.
Some damaged parts had to be removed, but the head of the penis and shaft were intact.
After cleaning the wound, doctors reattached the penis, even though it had been without blood flow for about 9 hours in total (5 hours warm and 4 hours cold).
After inserting a catheter, the surgeon reconnected the tissues of the penis using dissolvable stitches. The scrotal skin was then sewn back to the cleaned skin of the amputated part.
Some of the skin on the tip of the man’s newly reconstructed penis started to die about a week later, a condition called necrosis due to lack of oxygenated blood flow there, but doctors were able to treat it and reverse the damage.
Despite all this, the man was still experiencing hallucinations, even trying to break out of the hospital at one point.
Doctors found that he had smuggled mushrooms into his hospital room, finding a handful of them in his nightstand in the urology ward.
Because the patient was not following medical instructions, he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit the day after surgery
Over time, his psychotic symptoms improved with continued medication, allowing him to return to the urology department.
Despite the drastically reduced size of his penis (not all severed fragments could be salvaged), his erectile function returned, and he was able to urinate on his own.
The doctors said: ‘To our knowledge, this is the first report of psilocybin-induced penile amputation with subsequent macroscopic replantation.’
