Health3 min(s) read
Published 10:11 24 Apr 2026 GMT
Seven years ago, Steven Hamill lost a large part of his penis to a rare strain of cancer after being misdiagnosed.
When he was just 26, he woke up one morning to find his penis severely swollen, but decided to carry on with his day, hoping it would simply go away.
Hamill told the hosts of ITV’s This Morning that he chose to “ignore it and hope it goes away itself”, as he thought “every guy would probably do”.
However, just hours later, as he was making a cup of tea, something happened that he certainly could not ignore.
He explained: “I looked down, and it was just blood everywhere — like up the cupboards, on my feet, all over the kitchen floor.”
The incident was definitely enough to warrant a trip to the doctors, where the possibility of cancer was ruled out almost immediately.
Hamill was told by a doctor: “It can’t be penile cancer. You’re 26. It only affects men over 50.”
Instead, he walked out believing he just had “a really bad case of balanitis” — a bacterial infection on the head of the penis, also known as the glans — that could be sorted pretty speedily by applying a topical steroid for a few weeks.
However, Hamill quickly realized that the cream was not working and, while the bleeding had not returned, he started getting an excruciating pain in his genitals.
Explaining what it felt like to the news show hosts, he said: “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.
“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.”
The day before his sister's wedding and a month after his balanitis diagnosis, the then-26-year-old passed out in his brother's car and woke up covered in blood. But, despite needing urgent medical care, 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 told the hosts.
Eventually, after returning to the hospital, Hamill was referred to cancer specialists who decided he needed to be circumcised, but he needed more than just the top off.
It turned out that a large part of his penis had been eaten away by the aggressive cancer, leaving a crater in his manhood, which he very calmly described as looking like a banana that had been bitten from underneath.
Before the surgery, the urologist told him: “‘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.'”
Despite the traumatic ordeal, Hamill claims his life has improved greatly in the years since his full recovery.
Now, the single father is raising awareness of the still-rare penile cancer.
In the US, the American Cancer Society estimates there are slightly over 2,000 new cases diagnosed per year.
