Alex woke up from the surgery without cancer, but also without a penis. We sat down with him to ask about losing an enormous (metaphorically) part of his body, and he told us ...

There are a number of things that your stereotypical male never wants to hear over the course of his life, like "We're out of beer," "Your wife saw you," or "That 1975 Camaro you bought in high school is finally beyond repair." But none of those even come close to the horror of hearing a doctor diagnose cancer of the penis. Well, in 2009, that is exactly what happened to Alex Duke. The good news was that doctors caught it early enough to prevent the cancer from spreading throughout his body. The bad news was that it was advanced enough that there was only one option: cutting the poor member off.

6 Your Whole Personality Changes

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As soon as I left the hospital (sans penis), I had hoped that my life would go back to normal, but six years later, I can say that it never did. In fact, within a few months of the surgery, everyone was telling me that I was pretty much an entirely different person. All of the changes to my personality can be traced back to my penectomy (isn't that just the worst word?), which looks like this:

There's post recovery pic at the end of that link. (NSFW, duh.)

Before the surgery I was talkative, confident, and really social. Afterwards? I felt like a second-rate member of society. People who get their penis removed deal with psychological trauma for years afterwards, and the fact that you can't get it back (more on that in a bit) only makes it worse. A lot of men have penis envy that revolves around being a size too small, but nobody tells you how to deal with Size Zero.

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It got to the point where my low self-esteem began to affect the quality of my work, even though my job didn't involve using my dick in any way. It didn't matter -- I was suddenly the guy in the office who didn't talk to anyone, because I felt like a) no woman would want to talk to me, and b) that every man was "more of a man" than I was. Only when it's gone do you realize that from a very young age, males take an approach to life that boils down to, "Everything's going to be fine; I've got this penis here."

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And then there was constantly dealing with how people find out, reliving that moment every time. Once, during a physical, the doctor was about to check me for a hernia (the "turn your head and cough" test). He had to double-check his charts -- he'd accidentally marked me down as a woman at the beginning of the physical (despite my beard and distinct lack of boobs). Finally, he saw my testicles and fixed the whole thing, even apologizing for thinking I was transgender.