Man With 100-Pound Scrotum, Dan Maurer, Receives Successful Surgery: Scrotal Lymphedema A ‘Debilitating’ Condition
A man who has lived with a 100-pound scrotum for years — struggling to walk even 40 steps without needing to stop for rest — has had a successful surgery removing the excess growth.
Dan Maurer first started noticing something strange happening to his scrotum in his 20s: It was expanding, first to the size of a baseball and then to the size of a basketball.
Initially, doctors told him to lose weight. When he began shedding the pounds, however, he was exasperated to find that it did nothing to stop the growth down there. In fact, his debilitating condition seemed to be getting worse. For seven years, the 39-year-old from Battle Creek, Mich., struggled with a devastating condition known as scrotal lymphedema — sometimes called scrotal elephantiasis — which involves the abnormal growth of the scrotum. The condition is caused by the obstruction of the blood vessels that drain the scrotum, and is quite rare.
Wesley Warren Jr., the man with a 130-pound scrotum who became somewhat famous for discussing his condition on television talk shows, died earlier this year due to diabetes and heart complications. But it was Warren who inspired Maurer to get help for his disorder. After seeing him on TV, Maurer decided to find a doctor who could help him successfully remove the growth.
He found Dr. Joel Gelman at the University of California, Irvine, who agreed to do the surgery — which lasted 14 hours and removed the 120-pound scrotum as well as some extra fat around Maurer’s stomach. After the surgery, Maurer weighed 150 pounds less, but he is still recovering and will need to learn how to walk again.
“He carried that growth around so long and they’re having trouble with his leg being able to support him,” Connie Maurer, Dan’s mother, told the NY Daily News. “He told me, ‘Mom, I thought when [they finished the surgery] I could bound out of that bed like a new man. He’s moving baby steps, but he wants to move [in] giant steps.”
Maurer is looking forward to having sex with his wife, Mindy, for the first time in seven years. And though he has some obstacles ahead of him — such as therapy, re-learning how to walk, and losing more weight — he's trying to stay optimistic: “It’s going to be a learning curve,” Maurer told the Daily News. "And if you don’t have a good heart going into it, you’re never going to achieve anything.”