"My son is thirteen months old. I feel like his penis isn't right since circumcision at birth. Too much skin? Almost half of the skin is trying to heal over the head. My son's physician keeps just ripping it back down. This makes it fill with blood (doesn't bleed out) which turns purple after a few days. I am supposed to pull it back every night in the tub. Is this proper care? This doesn't seem good to me. This has been going on for a year."
This is a common problem after an infant gets circumcised. The freshly cut skin edge tends to stick to the head of his penis (we call this adhesions), sometimes making it look like he wasn’t circumcised in the first place. I would say that most circumcised boys have some degree of “sticking” like this. When he gets older, and looses the baby fat above his penis, it will have less of a tendency to “hide” and the sticking will be less of a problem. When I see this problem in the office, I usually try to gently open the adhesions and then instruct the parents to retract the skin (pull it down – away from the head) each time you change the diaper. This will hopefully prevent it from sticking again. If the foreskin is severely adhered to the head, sometimes I will leave it alone until he is a little older, in the hopes that it will be easier to deal with as it grows.