39-year-old Dan Maurer had been carrying a weight no one should have to bear for more than five years.
He reached 227 kg and, despite managing to lose weight, his penis and scrotum continued to grow.
This was the result of a rare condition called scrotal lymphedema that prevented him from walking more than 12 meters without pain.
His own parents weighed his parts with difficulty, reaching a total of 36 kg. The weight even bent the steel bar of the scale.
On August 28, 2014, he entered the operating room at the University of California-Irvine for a 12-hour surgery with three medical teams rotating in shifts. At one point, while Dan was still on the operating table, his mother saw him from the cafeteria: the surgeon, Dr. Joel Gelman, was calmly eating a sandwich. “Shouldn’t he be somewhere else?”, she asked him. He replied without batting an eye: “No, we have everything under control”. This indicated that the operation was going very well.
Upon waking, Dan pulled out his breathing tube in a panic, and the doctors had to sedate him again. He eventually left the operating room 68 kilos lighter, after having the growth removed and losing another 18 kilos of abdominal fat. His recovery included a pressure ulcer and months of therapy to walk again, funded in part by a campaign that raised more than 29.000 dollars.