Another Vote in Favor of Circumcision

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A penile cancer survivor is raising awareness of the rare disease that ate away at parts of his penis seven years ago, when he was just 26.

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In 2019, Hamill woke up one morning to find that his penis was severely swollen.

He decided to “ignore it and hope it goes away itself” — something, he thought at the time, “every guy would probably do.”

That plan backfired when, later, he was downstairs preparing a cup of tea and suddenly felt something wet. “I looked down, and it was just blood everywhere — like up the cupboards, on my feet, all over the kitchen floor,” he described.

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It was about a month after the balanitis diagnosis — and a day before his sister’s wedding — when Hamill passed out in his brother’s car and woke up to “blood everywhere,” all over the car seat and his pants.

He needed urgent medical care, but he refused to miss his sister’s big day.

“I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m going to wear one of them adult incontinence pad things, put it under my suit, just deal with the pain with self-medication.’” He relied on alcohol to get him through the evening.

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Once he returned to the hospital, Hamill’s urologist immediately referred him to cancer specialists who determined Hamill needed to be circumcised.

But, as it turns out, he would need much more than a trim.

Parts of Hamill’s penis had been eaten away by the aggressive cancer, to the point that — as he very calmly described it — it looked like a banana that had been bitten from underneath.

“It’s like a big crater in it,” he said. “The cancer was just eating away and that’s what the bleed was.”

Because of the extent of the damage, the circumcision didn’t cut it — and when he woke up from that procedure, Hamill was informed that he was going to need another much more invasive surgery in which they removed about four inches from the head.

Or, as the show’s host, Ben Shephard, so delicately put it, “they cut the end off.”

Hamill recalled the trepidation in the doctors’ voices as they prepared for the surgery. He could tell that “even the surgeons themselves thought ‘this guy probably won’t make it.’”

His urologist told him straight up: “‘This is bad … I’m going to try and save as much as I can because of your age … Go home, enjoy yourself for two days because your life’s going to change dramatically.'”

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While there’s no clear cause of penile cancer, the Moffitt Cancer Center says some experts think tumors can form “when bodily fluids become trapped within the foreskin,” which helps to explain why uncircumcised men are thought to have higher risk.

Circumcision is a common treatment in the early stages, as is cryosurgery to isolate and destroy cancerous cells. More advanced cases, including Hamill’s, could result in removal of the lymph nodes or penectomy, plus radiation or chemotherapy.

On the show, Parnham said most men experience penile cancer on the head of the penis or the foreskin, though it might be “hidden” under the foreskin.

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