TIFU by being uncircumcised and not knowing what hygiene is...

I won't bother with much of a content warning, since I already marked this as NSFW. Either way be warned there is quite a lot of information involving male genitalia. While this is a true "TIFU", in that it indeed occurred just today, the actual fuck up had been going on for essentially my entire life. TL;DR at the bottom. Also, English is my first language, but I am still bad at it and likely to make a ton of grammatical errors. Also I'm on PC so terrible formatting is entirely my fault.

For context, I am a male who (as you already likely realized from the title) is not circumcised. Now my father was circumcised, but I was not, so expectedly he didn't know a lot about hygiene for uncircumcised people, since he never experienced it himself. Thus, despite effectively conveying information about all other aspects of male hygiene to me, he never informed me that you are supposed to wash under the foreskin. You can probably tell where this is going.

Similarly, while health class talked plenty about sex, they rarely ever talked about hygiene (at least for me, if other people had different classes, lucky you) with the exception of telling us to shower and wash our hands. So again, never was I told how to properly clean my nether regions.

Now, so far you may think, "How is this a fuck up if your lack of hygienic knowledge isn't your fault?" and that's a fair point, except that at the same time as being ignorant, I was also stupid. Not only did I not know how to clean myself properly, I also hardly cleaned myself at all. I have the semi-fortunate trait of not smelling bad quickly if I don't shower frequently enough, so I would often only shower once or twice per week. I knew I probably should, but a seeming lack of necessity to shower, coupled with just enough stress and lack of motivation lead me to just shower whenever I became too itchy or began smelling (I am aware how disgusting that is, and I don't do that now, but that is the root cause of this fuck up).

So then there came the worst day by far. I woke up and realized my room smelled like a dead body. At first I literally thought a mouse or other animal had gotten into my room and died, but soon I realized that the smell was not coming from the room. It was coming from me. Along with this, the usual occasional pain I had from under the foreskin of my penis (No, that is not normal and yes, I assumed it was at the time) was dramatically worse as well.

I immediately showered, and while doing so noticed a few pieces of a yellow white substance on my foreskin. After some research, I realized it was smegma, and more research informed me that it could have indeed been what smelled so bad (so bad that I could smell it though my pants and my underwear). It was during this research that I realized you were supposed to wash under your foreskin, and also that you were supposed to be able to pull it back to expose the glans on the penis (and disturbingly, I could not at the time). That freaked me out a bit, but I decided that I would probably be fine if I just started showing every day and washing as much as I could actually get to, and perhaps it would eventually get back to a more healthy standard (and if not, I'd probably have to make a rather strange visit to the doctor).

Fast forward to about two weeks later (earlier today), and I was taking a shower when suddenly I realized I can now move my foreskin back much further than I could before. Doing this, I discover the most horrifying thing my eyes have ever witnessed (behind perhaps a human corpse), which is that beneath my foreskin, my penis was practically made out of smegma. Warning that the following information may be disturbing. The buildup was so extreme that not only was it as hard as wood and stuck to the penis, it was practically merged into it. The entire lower half of my urethra was blocked by it (I honestly don't even know how I peed at all prior to today), and it left markings where it came off the penis. As far as I know, this stuff had been there for years. And due to a negligent and infrequent showering schedule (coupled with not knowing what the consequences of which could be), I had basically had a second foreskin made of smegma for years, or even most of my life. Thank god I was in the shower, because the smell must have been unimaginable had there not been water washing away the putrid stench.

While I already mostly realized what the problem was a few weeks ago when I did some research, I never realized how incredibly severe it was until today. Now at least, I mostly know what I'm doing, but that was a horrific discovery combined with a realization of why showering is important.

TL;DR: My father and health class failed me, and I unintentionally turned my penis into a oversensitive rock by building up an ungodly amount of smegma due to neglecting to shower more than once a week.