The Brazilian Jucilene Marinho, a native of the municipality of Labras da Mangabeira, 23, was born with the Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, which is characterized by the absence of the vagina and most of the reproductive organs, or even all of them.
At age 15, Jucilene, who had never had the period but felt menstrual pain, discovered that the opening of her vagina was blocked by a tissue
She did not have uterus, cervix or ovaries, she says. The news devastated her – the adolescent dreamed of having children – and plunged her into a deep depression.
In April of the year, the young woman decided to undergo an innovative surgery at the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil -neovaginoplasty- and became the first woman in the world to have her vagina reconstructed with fish skin (specifically, tilapia).
Now doctors have confirmed the success of the surgical intervention.
What was the surgery?
The tilapia skin was sterilized and subjected to a special treatment to eradicate all possible viruses and the characteristics of a fishy smell.
The doctors introduced to vagina-shaped acrylic mold lined with cloth skin in an opening between the bladder and the patient’s anus, and removed it ten days later, the gynecologist Leonardo Bezerra, who was in charge of the surgery, said in remarks collected by The Sun.
The skin was absorbed into the patient’s body, where it acted as stem cells, and became a cellular tissue similar to that of a real vagina, forming the walls of the vaginal canal.
Marinho took three months to recover from the operation and in October she was allowed to have sex with her boyfriend.
“It was a wonderful moment, because everything happened to perfection, I did not feel pain, just a lot of pleasure and satisfaction,” said the young woman, assuring that the sex was “perfectly natural, as if the opening had always been there ” Jucilene feels that the operation has changed her life and allowed her to feel “a real woman”.
