Penis Enlargement Surgery Stories

Penis Enlargement
Surgery Story from Hell...

Ron Nance spent his inheritance to become a member of the elite club of men with humongous penises. But complications from the so-called 'perfectly safe' penile enlargement surgery have left him -- and many others -- shriveled, shamed and unable to perform sexually.

By Ami Chen Mills

"I live in a place where God comes for vacation. Gesturing toward the cliff edge just feet from his plastic deck chair, the cool, sapphire-blue waters of Monterey Bay stretch toward Moss Landing, and the hushed rhythm of breaking waves rises like a lullaby from New Brighton Beach below.

From Ron's front yard, studded with Monterey pine and eucalyptus trees, you can see forever.

Penis Enlargement Surgery Propoganda

But not if you're Ron Nance. "I've almost stepped off this cliff so many times," he says, tears falling rapidly from behind his impenetrable shades. "Look at this. It's so romantic--and my intimacy has been robbed from me."

A year and a half ago, Ron was 46, a carpenter with a simple life, aging but content. He'd just inherited 30 grand, had few debts and a new girlfriend.

"We were consumed," he says. "Mary" took him to his first opera. He took her on her first motorcycle ride. They made love in his former Felton home, and for the first time in her life, Ron says, Mary had orgasms. "It was wonderful. But I thought if I was just a little bit bigger, it could happen all the time."

After nearly a year, the passion cooled. "She seemed to almost outgrow me. We started to drift. ..."

That's when Ron saw the ad in the San Jose Mercury News. In bold letters the ad proclaimed: "For Men Only: Be All the Man You Want to Be!" It was one in a $200,000-a-month campaign waged at the time by urologist Melvyn Rosenstein, a man who traded his upright urological practice for a lucrative stake in the booming penile-enlargement industry.

Today Rosenstein, one of the first and most famous penile enlargement surgeons, faces the end of his career. As of Jan. 25, Rosenstein's medical license was restricted, to protect "public health and safety" pending a medical board hearing. The celebrated surgeon of schlongs faces permanent suspension from the California Medical Board based on complaints from patients--including Ron Nance--whose enlargements have gone wrong. Ron Nance's story may mark the beginning of the decline of the man they call Dr. Dick.

In 1990, Dr. Melvyn Rosenstein improved on a method developed by Miami-based cosmetic surgeon Ricardo Samitier. (Samitier is serving time for manslaughter after a botched penile enlargement killed a lounge singer with a weak heart.) Since 1990, the Rosenstein Medical Group claims to have performed anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 penile enlargements using ligament-severing and Samitier's fat-injection technique at Rosentein's upscale Culver City clinic.

Rosenstein has been featured on the Howard Stern show and CNN. His enlargement of the most famous penis of our time, John Wayne Bobbitt's, made the talk shows. Even late last year, after horror stories of enlargements gone bad began trickling out, magazines like Esquire were doing feature-length articles on the doctor who boasted of performing ten enlargements a day.

It all sounded good to Ron Nance. With a few grand in the bank and a girlfriend who seemed to be slipping away, Ron decided, "I'm going to do something for Ron." He biked to San Francisco and met a man named Peter Zapp, frontman for the clinic and, also, a Rosenstein Group client. There, in the sleek Citicorp building with a commanding view of the San Francisco skyline, Zapp would sell Ron on the glories of a giant penis.

'You'll be a member of the club' he said. Ron recalls, "It was like we were this growing army. This was something to make me feel better about my aging self--all of a sudden I'm going to be part of a society of men with humongous penises." Ron says another reason he opted for the surgery was because he's a big man. "And 'average' on big looks small," he notes.

Penis Enlargement Surgery Safety...

According to Zapp, the surgery was "perfectly safe"--words the Rosenstein Group continues to use. If there were any complications, Nance says, Zapp claimed that the one-time surgery fee would cover everything. But complications were rare, and minor. Dr. Rosenstein stood by his patients.

What Zapp did not tell Ron, however, was that he himself had been back for "touch-ups" on his own surgery at least twice and had resorted to hanging weights from his penis to minimize scarring. Ron would find this out later, when his own penis had become an alien appendage, marked with scars, shrunken to less than original size, swelling, tearing at suture sites, oozing, even bending backwards. "The man promised me the world. He didn't tell me that my manhood was at risk."

Forget the Surgery - Penis Enlargement Techniques that Work for Us!

Penis Surgery Procedure

Ron agreed to do the surgery. There was one last thing. Zapp was clear. When Ron went down to the clinic, he would be asked why he wanted the surgery. Peter told him, "You have to tell them: I want to feel 'symmetrical and balanced.' Nothing about your girlfriend or anything else," Ron recalls.

After plunking down $5,900 for what he was told was a "flawless, painless" procedure, on Nov. 11, 1994, Ron Nance jetted into LAX, where a Ramada Hotel shuttle bus whisked him to the clinic. There, a young urologist named Brian Rosenthal introduced himself. Rosenthal informed Ron that he would perform the surgery--"even though I had paid for Dr. Rosenstein's expertise," Nance notes. Not to worry, Rosenthal said, he was trained in the procedure and had done "hundreds" of them.

Rosenthal led him through a brief interview during which he learned that Ron was not circumcised. No problem, he said. Rosenthal asked Ron to fill out a health questionnaire, and then asked why he wanted the procedure. "I said, 'Because I want to feel symmetrical,' and he said, 'Okay.' That was it," Ron says. On Nance's "Penile Enlargement Evaluation" records, Dr. Rosenthal wrote: "The patient is counselled extensively regarding penile augmentation and advancement surgery. This is done using the teaching aids and pictures, the possible complications of infection, bleeding and loss of transplanted fat are also discussed with him."

Within 20 minutes, Ron Nance was on a stretcher rolling toward the operating room with an orderly cooing in his ear: He would be back to work in three days, running on the beach again in two weeks and "back in the saddle" in one month. Disoriented, but still hopeful, Ron succumbed to anesthesia and nodded out.

Hook, Line and Sinker: Ron Nance fell for Dr. Melvyn Rosenstein's promises but instead got the rack: 10 pounds of weight at night to keep his penis from retracting further after a botched penile-enlargement surgery.

Forget the Surgery - Penis Enlargement Techniques that Work for Us!

The Pain and Suffering
of Penis Enlargement Surgery

When he awoke an hour later, everything in his world would be altered. As Ron says now, "I will never be the Ron Nance that walked into that clinic on Nov. 11."

The procedure took one hour. There was a recovery period of one hour. Then Ron was shipped home. Still dazed, Ron assumed he had a bigger, better penis. The Rosenstein Medical Group was $5,900 richer--a drop in the bucket for a business that grosses upwards of an estimated $13 million annually.

Back in Felton, as medication wore off, the nightmare began. Nance is no stranger to pain. A carpenter and an active, middle-aged man, Ron has suffered a ruptured disc, a fractured jaw, broken collarbone, ankle and nose, a cracked skull and a split sternum. "I had a long love affair with pain," he says. The pain he suffered after his enlargement surgery, however, was worse than anything he'd experienced. "That wasn't even the first step in this ladder."

According to Ron, incision areas became infected. His foreskin clamped shut because of swelling. He couldn't urinate. Following Rosenstein's "helpful post-operative hints," which advise against calling another doctor or hospital, Ron called the Rosenstein clinic and spoke with Dr. Rosenstein, who told him to squeeze his penis to force discharge out and put a bandage on it. "Your member is dying and screaming, 'Don't touch me!' and you're supposed to squeeze it with all your strength," Ron moans.

Penis Enlargement Surgery Repair

When the pain did not subside, Ron flew back to L.A. for an emergency circumcision. Rosenstein took over, saying the circumcision should have been performed before the enlargement. Nance says when Rosenstein cut into him, "all this fat just spewed everywhere." Because his penis was still swollen from the first surgery and infection, Rosenstein was forced to stitch swollen skin. When the swelling finally went down, "everything just opened up again." He flew back to L.A. for repair work on the circumcision and says Rosenstein "had to go into fresh meat." In the process of losing skin, Ron's penile shaft was pushed further back into his abdomen. With no room to hang, Ron's penis started to bend, a condition known in post-enlargement circles as "banana syndrome."

Mary drove down from San Francisco for a visit in November and found Ron dysfunctional, severely infected, wracked with pain and feverish. Alarmed, she called Rosenstein and decided to accompany Ron on a fourth trip to L.A. The fever and infection were so bad when he arrived, Southwest Air had paramedics waiting at the airport. Rosenstein sent him to the emergency room at the Brotman Medical Center. Ron was given morphine and the doctor replaced ripping sutures with plastic staples. Then Ron was sent to the Ramada Hotel for two nights. When he woke, still dazed, the second morning, Mary was gone.

She would explain later that, in his agony, he had "scared" her. "To this day," he says, "she won't have anything to do with me." Ron doesn't blame her. "This was my issue--she didn't sign on for this." Still, he says, "I've never missed anyone so much in my life."

Although Dr. Rosenstein wrote on Nov. 28 that Ron was "markedly improved," Ron Nance would fly back to L.A. for repair work four more times. His penis was now shorter than before he had the procedure. By Jan. 30, two months after the first operation, he was unable to have an erection. He was told to buy weights to hang from his penis to correct bending. He was sold a bag of needles to shoot hormones into his penis to achieve an erection.

Penis Enlargement Surgery Embarrassment

Deserted by his girlfriend, too embarrassed to tell anyone, Ron started calling Peter Zapp, the man who sold him the procedure. When Zapp learned of Ron's complications, he confessed that he, too, had been back for repair work. The two became phone buddies--even as Zapp continued to sell enlargements. They commiserated, but not without Ron asking, "Why, Pete? Why didn't you tell me?" Zapp said he had just started on the job when Ron showed up--another novice.

Eventually Zapp stopped returning Ron's calls. His office phone registered a constant busy signal. Today, Zapp is nowhere to be found. A spokesman for Rosenstein's clinic says Peter Zapp went deaf after a firecracker exploded near his ear. Someone else says the Sacramento office where Zapp was transferred was closed when it failed to produce.

Forget the Surgery - Penis Enlargement Techniques that Work for Us!

Penis Enlargement Surgery
Dick Around...

Visits to Dr. Rosenstein were draining Ron's bank account. Every flight down, the emergency circumcision, all medications, the penile weight set, the hospital visit, cabs to and from the clinic, and hotel stays at the Ramada had depleted most of Ron's inheritance.

With a smaller, impotent penis, now disfigured and still sometimes in pain, Ron Nance was a wreck. Ashamed to admit he'd squandered his inheritance on a vanity procedure, he avoided friends. His family kept an awkward distance. Ron became a recluse. Still unable to perform sexually, Ron told Rosenstein in February 1995 that he was out of money.

"Dr. Rosenstein said, 'Borrow the money and fly down here and I'll pay for your flight.' Not only did he not do that, but he charged me for [needles and hormones]," Ron seethes.

Over the phone, Dr. Rosenstein told Ron to get a grip on himself. He then recommended that Ron see someone else, a urologist in Atherton by the name of Dr. Ritter, a new "member" of his group. Rosenstein would return Ron's frustrated phone calls until, in April, he stopped.

Sitting on the cliff edge near the stone cabin where he moved last year, Ron weeps. But a white-hot anger rises through his sobs. "I try to be real selective about the piles of shit I step in. But sometimes you don't know what you're getting into. He always said he was going to stand by me. I feel like a woman must feel when somebody's raped her. I feel real dirty." Sobs overcome him. There is only the sound of Ron crying and surf pounding the beach below. It's the background music of his recent life.

Penis Enlargement Surgery Fraud

Ron's case is clouded by the fact that two doctors handled his manhood at separate times. Rosenthal left Rosenstein's clinic within six months to set up shop at the competing Surgery Center for Men in Beverly Hills. But when he began there in October 1994, Rosenthal was eager to learn the procedure from the man who performed it most, and was making the most money at it.

When Ron stepped into the Rosenstein clinic, he did not know that Rosenthal had been at the clinic for less than a month. Rosenthal claims, however, that the enlargement surgery is simple compared to other penile surgeries he has performed.

On the curriculum vitae passed to Ron in 1994, Brian Rosenthal is listed as "attending staff urologist" at Brotman Medical Center--the same hospital at which Melvyn Rosenstein lays claim to a number of staff positions. Yet the hospital says today that Rosenthal is still merely an "applicant in process" at the hospital--not a staff member. Staff there refuses to give information about Rosenstein, except to say he is a "member in good standing" at the center.

Rosenthal says he had no control over his own curriculum vitae. "They made the marketing stuff. I never saw that." As for Ron Nance's complications, Rosenthal's position is that he was merely a knife-for-hire at the Rosenstein Group, and a temporary one at that. "It was all really new to me. They were already so busy. I didn't really feel like I had total control of my patients because I was working in his office. In my opinion, the problem there was just too many patients, with inadequate follow-up."

Penis Enlargement Surgery Complications

After hearing a description of Ron's problems, Rosenthal says Ron's complications were "the result not of the actual penile enlargement surgery but rather the severe paraphimosis that developed." During paraphimosis, the foreskin constricts and forms a tight ring, like a rubber band, below the head of the penis. But what Ron suffered sounds more like phimosis, when the foreskin constricts over the head of the penis as Ron's did.

Neither Rosenthal nor Rosenstein noted either condition on Ron's records. Further, there is no record of Ron's emergency circumcision. When Ron called screaming of pain five days after his surgery, Rosenstein wrote, "patient has considerable subcoronal edema. [Swelling behind the head of the penis, a condition which normally does not prohibit urination.] I have advised him to use an ACE wrap on this, and will follow again in two weeks."

Rosenthal is anxious to clear his name. "I've been getting great results with not nearly as many problems as I saw there. I'd certainly like to see [Ron] in my office. I wouldn't charge him anything--he's one of my patients."

Ron balks at the offer. "No, no, no! I gave these guys every chance to fix these problems. This is the man that guaranteed me right from the start that everything would be fine. No thanks."

Learn more about the Natural Penis Enlargement alternative to Penis Enlargement Surgery.

Our Choice - Penis Enlargement Sites that Work for Us!

Penis Enlargement Resource Natural Penis Enlargement
Penis Enlargement Techniques
Penis Enlargement Safety
Penis Anatomy
Penis Medical Conditions
Penis Size Survey
Penis Enlargement Stories
Penis Jokes and Weird Stories
Penis Enlargement Blog