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It’s been nearly 25 years and urological surgeon Dr. James Sehn can still picture the day he met John Wayne Bobbitt and his famous phallus.
“They said, ‘You know, we’ve got this guy here whose penis has been cut off. Can you come down and basically put it back on?’” Sehn recalls in the aptly titled “20/20” special “The Bobbitts: Love Hurts,” which is set to air Friday.
“It came to us just in a bag of ice, concealed in a brown paper hot dog bag,” he said. “It was a kind of an out-of-body experience. It really takes your breath away to see this kind of disfigurement.”
Sehn told ABC News that Bobbitt lost a third of his blood before going under the knife but remained “very calm” the entire time.
“I mean just almost surprisingly calm, as if he didn’t even understand the extent of this injury and what the implications of it might be,” Sehn said.
Bobbitt’s wife, Lorena, had just hacked off the 26-year-old’s penis while he slept, and she fled their apartment — later tossing it out the window as she drove to her boss’s house.
“There is no way we’re going to find it,” former Prince William County Police Officer Kim Chinn recalled thinking in an interview with ABC from 1993. “And they did, just within a few minutes.”
Bobbitt had been told by surgeons that he’d have to “sit down to go to the bathroom, you know, for the rest of my life” had they not found his member.
“I would come to, and then a doctor would be there, and they would say that ‘If they don’t find the, you know, other part, then they would have to just sew me up,'” he explained.
Sehn said it was around 6 a.m. when they finally got their hands on Bobbitt’s penis. The doctor was joined by plastic surgeon Dr. David Berman and several other experts during the nine-hour operation.
“The biggest concern I had is, simply, that it had to work,” Berman told ABC, noting how he had never seen a “penile replantation” before.
“There was no second chance,” he said. “They’re extremely rare…but I had done a lot of microsurgeries. So I’d put a lot of fingers back on, and…it was just this particular application was different.”
The surgery went off without a hitch, and Bobbitt went on to use his famous phallus in porno films and behind closed doors.
“It was the happiest day of my life,” said the 51-year-old. “It’s like opening Christmas presents on Christmas Day and you’re a little kid…I was excited.”
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