Circumcision Nightmare Every Parent Should Know
Heather Fair is with Heather Fair.
The biggest regret of my life was mutilating my son by allowing circumcision…💔
“*** I FAILED AS A MOTHER ***
“I was 22 when I fell pregnant with my oldest son. I was young, stupid and uneducated. I thought I had done all the research I could have, but with pressure from my family and inaccurate information from doctors, I ultimately left the decision to circumcise up to my husband as I figured “I don’t have a penis so it’s not my place.”
“I failed as a mother in that moment.
“My son was born at 37 weeks in October of 2015. He was perfect! Sweet, calm, quiet, I remember him laying on my chest for immediate skin to skin bonding and he just laid there silently looking up at me.
“I originally refused the Vitamin K shot for my son, which I wish I would have stuck to, because the doctor won’t circumcise a baby without that shot, but my mother insisted “if you don’t circumcise I will not help you, because you have to do so much work to take care of an uncircumcised baby.”
“So I caved and got him the shot.
At three days old, the nurse came in. She took him for his infant testing and circumcision. They wheeled my sweet, quiet baby away.
“When he finally came back about two hours later, he was a completely different baby. My instincts knew instantly something was wrong and that I had made a terrible terrible mistake.
“He would no longer sleep, he screamed inconsolably, he wouldn’t eat, no amount of skin to skin snuggles would help him.
“I must have called the nurse four times begging her to listen to me that something was wrong with my boy. They finally called the doctor the next afternoon who had done the surgery.
“Now when my husband had agreed to circumcise our son, I did look up how it was done, and found both the clamp methods, but I didn’t see a single thing on the plastibell method, which is the method they used.
“If you’re unfamiliar with the plastibell method, the doctor takes a blunt rod and inserts it into the membrane between the glans and the foreskin, forcibly tearing the membrane separating the foreskin (which is attached like a fingernail to the nail bed) from the glans. Then they slide a “bell” over the glans to secure a plastic ring to the inside of the foreskin, where then then tie a tight string around the outside of the foreskin, pinching the skin and cutting off blood flow so the skin can then die slowly and fall off. In about 7-10 days as I read.
“The doctor who did this to my son had messed up and couldn’t even face me himself to tell me what he had done. I heard it from a nurse.
“My son’s plastibell stayed attached to him for 60 days total, twisting and tearing daily until it finally fell off. When it finally fell off, his penis was inflamed and red, it would ooze and bleed, and he was rushed to ER after ER and doctor after doctor, all brushing my concerns under the rug telling me “it’s normal” when in my gut I knew it wasn’t.
“Finally at 18 months old, my son had his one year check up with a new doctor, Dr. Rachel, she finally listened to me!!! No other doctor had before, she removed his diaper and checked my son’s circumcision, come to find out he had been injured, half of his penis was intact while the other half had been over circumcised. The over circumcised side was so cut the skin couldn’t meet to heal, so for the last 18 months my son lived with an open wound on his penis.
“We were given a special cream to apply which helped it finally heal, but he was left with this huge ungodly scar now.
“Fast forward to his 3rd birthday, everything was as normal as it could be for him. He is still clearly traumatized and screams at diaper changes. He had gotten his first premature erection. When this happened the tight skin and scar tissue could not accommodate the growth of an erection, so his skin did the only thing it could, it ripped horribly so. The skin ripped so violently his nerves are damaged leaving him numb, and he tore a tendon which left the muscle flaccid and limp, he can no longer get erect.
“The doctors won’t even consider reconstruction until he is at least 5 years old, in which time they can only give me a 45% chance of restoring proper function to my son.
“My biggest regret in life is that I mutilated my son, that I caused this. And I fight everyday to forgive myself and try to make up for what I have done.” C.B. in Pennsylvania
