Las Vegas man with 100-pound scrotum seeks money for surgery
It sat in front of him, on top of a pillow that rested on a milk crate.
He sprinkled baby powder on it — what looked like a huge watermelon encased in a compression bandage — but the unmistakable smell of urine couldn’t be completely smothered.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” 47-year-old Wesley Warren Jr. said in the poorly lit apartment. “It’s freakish.”
What sat in front of where Warren was seated in shorts — what is actually attached to him — was more than 100 pounds of scrotum, the protective sac of skin and muscle that contains his testicles.
“It’s not easy to get around,” he said, standing and groaning as he lifted his scrotum off its makeshift pedestal and carefully let it hang almost to the floor. “It makes me stay in most of the time.”
If there is a more unusual medical condition afflicting someone from Southern Nevada, the medical community or patient hasn’t come forward with it. Warren has gone public, even though he knows there will be those who laugh at him, because he desperately wants a costly surgery to correct the scrotal elephantiasis that became part of his life nearly three years ago.
Daily bouts of depression — “I want to have real friends and a relationship with a woman” — throw him into the depths of despair. “But I’m not suicidal. I’m too strong for that.”
Much like Victorian England’s Joseph Merrick, whose life with severe deformities became the subject of both the play and movie, “The Elephant Man,” Warren has concluded that to escape his present life he must allow himself to be exhibited.