It’s a hard topic to address.
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.
Steven Hamill sat down with the hosts of ITV’s “This Morning,” plus his urologist at Britain’s Clatterbridge Hospital, Dr. Arie Parnham, to talk about the near-death experience that resulted from his initial misdiagnosis.
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.
Finally, he took his body’s not-so-subtle hint to see a doctor, who brushed off the possibility of penile cancer because of his age. Hamill said he was told, “‘It can’t be penile cancer. You’re 26. It only affects men over 50.’”
He walked out “in celebration mode,” thinking he was cancer-free and only suffering from “a really bad case of balanitis” — a bacterial infection on the head of the penis, also known as the glans — that would be cleared up by a topical steroid that the doctors instructed him to apply for a few weeks.
But the party was cut short.
The cream, he said, didn’t make a difference. And while the bleeding hadn’t come back, he started experiencing excruciating pain in his genitals.
“The only way I can describe this pain is, if I had a needle and I was just poking at the head consistently every second, like, there was no respite,” he told the hosts. “The only time I got some sleep was when my body just crashed two days later, or I’d have a five-hour bath because the warm water soothed it. The pain was just that horrific.”
When the bleeding started again, he knew he was due for another visit to the doctor.
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.
“Me and [the cocktail] pink gin had a really good relationship that day,” he recalled.
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.’”
But, if anything, Hamill said, in the years since his full recovery, his life has actually gotten a lot better.
“I see life in a different way now,” he said.
Today, the single dad works to raise awareness of penile cancer, which is still rare globally. In the US, the American Cancer Society estimates there are slightly over 2,000 new cases diagnosed per year.
The disease is considered curable in some cases, such as Hamill’s, and, like all cancers, is most easily treated when detected early.
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 people experience penile cancer on the head of the penis or the foreskin, though it might be “hidden” under the foreskin. Signs of the disease include red patches on the skin, masses or growths, changes in color or bleeding.
Some people develop an infection on top of the cancer, he added, which might result in some discharge that’s noticeable in their underwear.
Left untreated, it will often spread to the lymph nodes in the groins.
Any changes on the penis should be checked out, he said, and if they’re not going away after two weeks of some treatment, it might be time to talk about cancer.
For his part, Hamill seems to have adjusted to his new life just fine. Though dating has its “ups and downs,” he ultimately feels that what he lost in inches he gained in perspective.
“I’m learning my body again and learning how to communicate,” he said, “but it’s made relationships a lot more intimate, a lot more connected, which I would probably say makes me a better person.”
The advocate chose not to get reconstructive surgery because his doctors said there was no guarantee that he would regain sensation, and it might cause him to lose even more sensitivity.
But at this point, size doesn’t concern him — and though some online bullies have taken to calling him “stumpy,” he’s still left with “more than enough to work with.”
“I’m a strong believer of ‘you can’t move forward if you keep looking back,’” he said. “I’ve had my child. Life’s just great, just aesthetically a bit strange.”
