Wesley Warren Jr., known for his 132 lb. scrotum, died on Friday at a Las Vegas hospital. There was no official announcement of cause of death.
The problem started, when Warren said his scrotum first started to swell in May 2008, when he endured an injury on his right testicle. “I woke up the next day and my scrotum was the size of a honeydew melon,” he told The Huffington Post Live in August. “My personal hell was just beginning.”
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Warren’s roommate, Joey Hurtado said Warren had suffered two heart attacks recently. “He was in the hospital for five and a half weeks,” Hurtado told the paper. “He had infections that I think were brought on by his diabetes and then he had those heart attacks.” He also said he didn’t believe that his friend’s testicle removal surgery last year was a factor in the death.
His scrotum grew, expanding three pounds or more every month. Warren had no health insurance so he couldn’t get help, until he became famous, internationally known for his extremely large scrotum. He would wear a hooded sweatshirt upside down to house the huge scrotum. “Even when I got offers to help, it was hard,” he told the HuffPost. “My scrotum was so large I couldn’t get on a plane. I was too big to use an airplane restroom.”
The news of Warrens condition surfaced in October 2011. In the beginning he looked for donations to pay for his $1 million surgery, but strangely enough he said no to an offer from the “Dr. Oz Show.” They wanted to pay for the surgery in exchange for interview rights. That lead to some speculating that Warren was interested in getting his 15 minutes of fame more than the misery caused by his enlarged scrotum.
In response he said, “Who would want to live like this? I just don’t want to die during the operation.” Radio talk show host Howard Stern convinced Warren to see Dr. Joel Gelman, a urologist in California who specializes in scrotal lymphedema, a disorder that causes the scrotum to become “extremely large as lymph fluid and tissue accumulates.” Warren had the surgery last April and weighed in at 552 pounds. After the surgery, he was 200 pounds lighter.
According to the HuffPost, Warren admitted that his condition left him with “no sex drive and little or no testosterone.” He said that a lack of a sex drive may have been a blessing in disguise. “Imagine if I had desires,” Warren said. “There isn’t anything I could’ve done about it. That would be a personal kind of hell.”
Image credit: www.therealstevegray.com
