Embarrassing Illnesses

Voiceover:
34-year-old Ed came to see Dr Christian, worried about the size of his willy.

Ed:
It’s very embarrassing, makes it difficult to urinate, and to, well, impossible really to have sexual intercourse.

Voiceover:
Dr Christian diagnosed him with a buried penis, and referred him to Mr Christopher, a consultant uroandrologist.

Mr Christopher:
I understand you’ve had some surgery before, as well?

Ed:
Yeah, I’ve had, uh, a gastric bypass, and I’ve had some, um, some other plastic surgery, a tummy tuck, a…

Mr Christopher:
I see, you must have lost a lot of weight, then.

Ed:
Yeah, I lost 19 and a half stone, yeah.

Mr Christopher:
Shall I, uh, shall I have a look at you then?

Ed:
Yeah, sure.

Mr Christopher:
And I can see this huge overhang of skin here and there’s some fat there. The base of the penis, I’ll examine you, is actually here, which is in the middle of this lump of fat, fatty skin here. So, we just pull this right up, excise the floppy bits and attach it to the scar that you already have here…that’s probably what you’d be left with, something like that. So would that be satisfactory?

Ed:
Yeah, that’s an awful lot better than it is now.

Mr Christopher:
Yeah?

Ed:
Yeah, it’d be fantastic.

Mr Christopher:
As long as you don’t put the weight back on, it’ll be fine.

Ed:
No, no chance of that.

Mr Christopher:
Okay?

Ed:
Super.

Mr Christopher:
All right.

Voiceover:
Now that Ed has a surgical plan in place, he’s well on the way to having less willy worry.

Voiceover:
Ed’s arrived at the Spire Thames Valley Hospital for his operation.

Mr Christopher:
Edward basically has buried penis syndrome, which is related to obesity, so large rolls of fat hanging down, and as a result of this, the penis cannot expand out. Buried penises are getting more common. I’ve been in this practice probably ten years, and we’re getting more and more referrals. People are getting fatter and fatter.

Voiceover:
Once Ed is put under, Mr Christopher has to make an incision across his abdomen, roughly in the same place where the scar is from his tummy tuck operation.

Mr Christopher:
The base of the penis is here. Underneath all this, I can feel the penis there with my finger, just at the bottom of this incision. I have to be careful now that we don’t, that we don’t go through the penis.

Voiceover:
He needs to cut down to where the skin is attached to the abdominal wall, to start the process of removing the excess skin and fat. It isn’t just a case of slicing off some fat around the penis; Mr Christopher has to avoid cutting certain vessels that affect sensation in the genitals.

Mr Christopher:
I just identified the blood vessels in the testicle, the spermatic cord. If I get his testicle and pull, it moves a bit. So we don’t want to damage…damage that.

Voiceover:
His aim is to leave only one and a half inches of subcutaneous fat around the penis.

Mr Christopher:
This fat here is just slipped over like that. So we need to disconnect this from the penis. It’s going to look a bit painful now.

Voiceover:
To ensure the penis is straight and identifiable when he cuts through the skin, he threads a suture through the glans for the surgical nurse to manipulate.

Mr Christopher:
We know the base of the penis is here somewhere, so we’ll just give that a little wiggle. We just need to find it. That’s the penis there…so if we give it another wiggle, we see it moving up and down.

Voiceover:
Only part of the penis is exposed in all men. The organ runs behind the skin in the pelvic area. So especially in Ed’s case, what you can see really is the tip of the iceberg.

Mr Christopher:
So you can see, the penis is quite big, it goes from down here to up here. There is a little bit of loss of skin there…I think he’ll manage.

Voiceover:
Once he has safely cut all the skin and fat away from the penis, all Mr Christopher has to do is pull up and attach the leftover skin from the wound left from the tummy tuck operation, exposing the penis.

Mr Christopher:
It went quite well. He’s got quite a large penis, uh, when we looked at it in theatre, so I expect when he stands up, when he’s recovered from this surgery, the tummy will move down slightly, and he’ll have, you know, enough to have sex with. He’s certainly got enough to pee with.

Voiceover:
After just a few weeks, he’s back in the clinic.

Dr Christian:
Ed, hi, how are you? So from what I understand of the operation, penis size was normal, under expiration, all that we actually needed to do was remove that apron, so something called an apronectomy. But tell me, how are you feeling about it all now?

Ed:
Yeah, I’m feeling pretty positive. Um, I can already tell a bit of a difference. Already I’ve can, I’ve been using urinals in the gents, it’s just much easier, um, no mess, no drippage. Things are staying dry, which is great, so that’s already improved.

Dr Christian:
And that in itself is a great result, actually. And then, the other obvious question is, what about sexually? Is it still working properly?

Ed:
It’s still, still in working order…

Dr Christian:
It is.

Ed:
Yeah.

Dr Christian:
Good. You’ve tried it out, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Ed:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Dr Christian:
Excellent. All right, well, let’s have a look, check you’re healing up properly, see how it is now. If you go over to the couch there, and I’ll get some gloves on.

Dr Christian:
All right, so let’s have a look at you. Okay, so you’ve got a little dressing here, but actually the scar is this whole length along here, is it, that they’ve used.

Ed:
That is it, yeah.

Dr Christian:
But it’s in the line of an old scar anyway…

Ed:
It is, yeah.

Dr Christian:
Which is probably why it’s not so sore for you at all. I mean, the most noticeable thing is that there’s a lot more of your penis now exposed, isn’t there, than there was before, really. It was just the end was visible, amongst the sort of overhanging apron and the fat. So clearly, that’s all been moved away. Are you happy with the way it looks?

Ed:
Yeah, it’s, it’s a lot better, a big improvement on what it was, so I’m really happy with it, yeah.

Dr Christian:
Excellent, good. Okay, pop your things back on, thank you.

Ed:
Cheers, thank you.

• Add your comment
• Ask a question
• Apply for the show

Bookmark with

• Delicious
• Digg
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon