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Why the Only Two Men in the World With Bionic Dicks Can’t Get Along

Who do they have but each other?

Mohammed Abad’s penis was torn off when he was 6 years old.

He was waiting to cross a busy road in his hometown of Huddersfield, England, with a bunch of friends when a snowball fight broke out.

“All I remember is that I got the last throw in,” he writes over email. In retaliation for that throw, however, he was pushed into the road and dragged under the wheels of a car for 600 feet. “My penis ripped off and I lost a testicle,” he explains.

He was taken to the hospital and given 12 hours to live.

Miraculously, the medical team was able to save Abad’s life — just not his penis. In its place, they fashioned a 1.2-inch “wee tube.” It was a ground-breaking surgery at the time, but his jury-rigged penis could never become erect and was numb to the touch. Abad also was unable to pee standing up.

His doctors’ advice? Make the best of it.

He did his best, despite it being difficult for him to fit in at school after news of the accident spread. He says he never associated with girls because he knew sooner or later — if all went well — they would be reaching for something that didn’t exist.

After he graduated from secondary school, Abad tried to focus on his job at an Edinburgh convenience store, but he longed for a normal life. As he told the Daily Mail, “I was about 31 or 32 and went to the doctors again and said, ‘I’m desperate. I need some kind of help. I’m ready to see the world out there.’”

They couldn’t do anything for him at the time, but around five years later, Abad got a letter out of the blue offering him the chance to become the first man in Britain to have a new type of penis reconstruction surgery. A long wait followed while NHS funding was secured to pay for the £70,000 penis.

Mohammed Abad

In 2012, he began three years of 119 painful surgeries at University College London, over which time an 8-inch penis was constructed using skin and tendons that were taken from his arm and rolled up like a sausage roll. “The doctor said, ‘You’ve got a big arm, so we’ll be able to make you a big penis,’” Abad remembers.

There have been a handful of penis transplants reported in the world — a failed one in China in 2006 and successful ones in South Africa and Massachusetts in 2014 and 2016, respectively. But only one other man has had Abad’s procedure, specifically: A fellow Brit named Andrew Wardle who was born with an incredibly rare condition called bladder exstrophy in which the bladder is formed on the outside of the body. To date, Wardle has received his flaccid penis — also crafted from skin borrowed from his arm — and is currently awaiting the final procedure that would allow him to get hard and have sex. “My penis just needs to be turned on in one more marathon operation in which they’ll add the mechanics,” he tells me via Skype. “They built me a pretty big penis. Comparable to what any man’s got. Having a penis was very strange at first. Walking around was a new experience with this thing flopping around, and looking down in the bath and seeing it floating there was bizarre. Also, jeans fit much better without a penis.”

Skin was grafted from Wardle’s arm to construct a penis | via Andrew Wardle

Abad’s version of that final 11-hour session occurred in 2015. He remembers the first moment he laid eyes on his new 8-inch member: “I felt out of this world. It was wonderful — I’m quite happy with what I’ve got.” His so-called bionic penis is connected with rubber tubes to a reservoir of resin that pumps to create the appearance of an erection. The implants can restore penile function to some degree; however, it’s a completely mechanical process, and doesn’t respond to sexual stimulation. Instead, he operates the system by pushing one button on his testicles to inflate it and another to deflate — kinda like the old Reebok Pump shoes, but with liquid rather than air. Abad does reach orgasm and ejaculate, and his “bionic penis” results in erections which allow for penetration during sex.

“My penis is working perfectly now so I just want to do it. I have waited long enough for this — it’ll be a great start to the new year,” Abad told the Sun in January 2016. In fact, back then, he was telling anyone who would listen that he planned to lose his virginity to a dominatrix named Charlotte Rose, Britain’s 2013 Sex Worker of the Year, who offered her services for free.

“In the end, he lasted for nearly two hours,” Rose told The Mirror. “I was impressed.”

These days, Abad has made it clear that he’s keen to meet up with an erotic cyborg once they’re developed. “It would be wrong to say that I don’t get lonely because I do. I am human,” he told the Daily Star recently. “I would definitely date a sex robot.”

“That guy is a jerk and obsessed with his penis,” Wardle says of Abad in our Skype conversation.

Wardle, a 44-year-old from Manchester, England, had the worst possible variation of bladder exstrophy. Some men who suffer from the disorder are born with bits of penis, he explains, but he had nothing. Doctors fixed the bladder problem, but Wardle never developed a penis. Abandoned at birth by his 17-year-old mother, Wardle was adopted by the nurse who cared for him at the hospital and her husband. He spent his childhood in and out of hospitals. “Not having a penis doesn’t really affect you as a kid,” he explains. “Just the operations. You have a lot, a lot of operations. But when you hit about 13 or 14, you know you’re in trouble and something really bad is coming.”

Young Andrew | Via the Mirror

Wardle underwent 15 operations to build a tube from his bladder so he could pass urine normally. But he managed to keep the secret from his friends and classmates until he shared his condition with the world in an article in the Sun in 2015. Next, he was the subject of an hourlong documentary on TLC called the Man with No Penis, which followed him as he confessed to unsuspecting ex-lovers and even his current girlfriend, a 24-year-old Hungarian named Frieda. In the documentary, Wardles explains he kept the secret from his partners by claiming to have kidney problems to avoid them touching that area of his body. He says he became an expert lover in other ways to cover for his lack of genitals. “I knew my way around a woman’s body; I knew my way around their mind,” he said in the show. “I was very confident in bed of what I could do to them so they wouldn’t come near me and they were finished and I was fine.”

Wardle also shared in the documentary that at his darkest point, he tried to end it all. After travelling to Lockerbie, he called his sister and ex-girlfriend to say farewell. His sister contacted emergency services, who found Wardle at a hotel with a knife at his throat and several empty bottles of pills and booze lying on the ground. He left the hotel in handcuffs — for his own protection — and spent three days at a local hospital before being released. He then flew to Thailand for some soul-searching. “That trip really did save my life,” he explained in the documentary. “I was in a dark place, but resolved to get up and do something about it.”

Wardle met Frieda in 2012 when they were both working at a holiday camp. “There’s never a good time to tell a new girlfriend you don’t have a penis,” he told the Mirror in 2015. “You can’t just drop it into conversation.” After the initial shock, though, Wardle says Frieda has been very supportive and that they’re “best friends” as well as partners.

Wardle is still awaiting the final step in the process, which he says has been the most expensive operation ever in the U.K. because surgeons had to build him a new bladder, as well. “My penis just needs to be turned on in one more operation when they’ll add the mechanics.” To test that everything works, Wardle says he will have to have an erection for two weeks.

“I’m not looking forward to that. I’ve got to get the train home from London that day.”

Wardle first met Abad backstage on a TV show they both appeared on a couple years ago, and was upset when the producers left the two men alone in the green room. “All he wanted to do was show me his penis,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘Mate, I’m a straight man, I don’t want to see your penis. Put it away. Now he’s on the telly every other week, probably getting 200 quid each time, bragging about having sex with robots. That’s nonsense. This is a taxpayer-funded operation. These doctors work miracles. The money spent on it wasn’t so he could sleep with prostitutes and robots.”

“That’s a load of rubbish I never wanted to show him my penis at all,” Abad tells me. “I don’t know why Mr. Wardle is upset. Everybody has their opinions. If I have upset or angered anyone, it wasn’t my intention. All I’m trying to do is be normal like everyone else.”

Wardle says some men decide life’s not worth living when they have genital deformities, and guys like him and Abad have a responsibility to them. He says he tries to spread a positive message about the condition, whereas Abad is only interested in cashing in. “People write me from all over the world with similar disorders. Not bladder exstrophy necessarily — though I did travel to Maryland to meet another man with exactly my condition — but other genital deformities like micropenis. I didn’t realize what an effect I could have on people until a man in Mexico wrote me and said he was planning to commit suicide until he heard my story.”

As for Abad, he did have one additional surgery last year — a penile reduction. Turns out his 8-inch penis was a big problem.

According to The Sun, Abad said his member was “too large and meant sex was painful.”