Breast Cancer in men

Then towards the end of 1995, I began to get an anomaly in the nipple of my right breast. It became a bit sensitive, and initially I have to say I thought- I decided to christen it my jogger’s nipple. Not that I actually do any jogging but you know it was- it sort of sounded good. However it got worse and in fact the nipple inverted which I found out later was a clear sign of breast cancer, but at that time I had no idea that men could get breast cancer and so I started putting Savlon on it which was a brilliant idea, to put Savlon onto cancer (laughs). Eventually, we visited [name of place] and my wife’s brother is a doctor. And one day, under her persuasion I got him to look at it, and he said to me, “I really think you’d better go to your GP and get it checked out”. So, when I got back, this is now in early 1996, I went to see my GP, and for the first time, he suggested, because he mentioned that I should need to see a Mr [name of surgeon], and I knew a Mr was a surgeon. So I realised that we were talking about something serious, and “yes” he said, “It looks as though you may have breast cancer”, which really was an extraordinary thought.

 It started back in January 2005 which is when I first noticed the lump on the right of my left nipple. I just sort of felt it and didn’t think anything of it, because I was, most men, think you can’t get breast cancer if you’re a man. This is what I thought, and so I left it and it was only about six months later that my wife felt it and said “what’s that?” and I said “well, I don’t really know, I think it’s a fatty lump or something”, and then she said “well, I think you better get it checked out at the doctors” so made an appointment at the doctors and still didn’t think anything of it. He felt it and said “yes, well it’s probably nothing, you know, but I’ll get you checked out by the… sort of breast care specialists at the hospital” … and made me an appointment at [the local] Hospital, which was probably about a week or so later with the doctor’s appointment. And then it was July ’05, the 18th of July, I think, and I had the appointment, went in, and of course, being a specialist they knew sort of something wasn’t right straight away, but they didn’t tell me that straight away, they sort of took me through somewhere else, had the mammogram, then they looked at it and then they took me into another room and said “yes, we’ll do a biopsy.” Did that, and then after that, about ten minutes later, they took me through to another room, sort of nice powder-coloured lilac room. And still didn’t think it was gonna be bad news but my wife thought “why are they taking us in here?” and that’s when they sort of sat us down and said “well, we think it’s breast cancer, but we’ve got to wait for the result of the biopsy just to be 100 percent sure.”

 The first time I got to know I thought it was a bruise. I walked into some timber, and it did swell, but not knowing I didn’t know at the time men could get cancer, breast cancer. So my wife noticed it and noticed the nipple going inwards and she told me to get in touch with the doctor, and when I got in touch with the doctor, like I said, I hadn’t seen the doctor in 36 years.

 I first noticed a problem? Believe it or not, I was on holiday. I think we were in Italy at the time, around Lake Garda, and shower, either drying or washing, I don’t know, but you just brush and you’re thinking “that’s strange, that.” I got my wife down yeah, it’s a lump of some sort, but didn’t think much about it, but this… it didn’t go away. I kept checking it every so… and it would, sort of underneath the, you know, underneath the pectoral muscles, around here somewhere, not thinking a lot about it, not knowing anything, just kept my eye on it and it kept going, but it wasn’t going away and sometimes it was, it seemed larger than, you know, other days, it just seemed to… oh, it’s gone again. Oh no, it’s still there. You know, because of the work schedule, decided to go… well, there was a window in the work schedule in October, so I went to the doctor’s in October, to the local GP. Unfortunately it was a locum because our GP was on holiday, so… saw the locum, who looked at it and he just said, “Well… don’t think there’s much to bother, it could be a cyst or something like… I don’t think there’s a lot to bother about, but we’ll have it checked out. I’ll refer to you to the hospital and let them have a look at it”, so… he just said “if you haven’t heard anything in two weeks, give us a ring or give the surgery a ring.” And I ain’t heard anything in two weeks. And I rang the surgery and they just said “haven’t got anything but we’ll check up for you, you know, we’ll make a few phone calls and see what’s going on, we’ll give you a ring back.” So within, I’d say within a couple of hours they rang me back and just said “yeah, there’s an appointment made for you, it will be in December”, which is like, ten, eleven weeks away from whenever. So thinking, I mean, little problems with, you know, lumps and bumps all over the body anyway, so I just thought, well, ten weeks is not too bad, you know? It’s pretty quick, really, so… went for the… on to the clinic, it were just a general surgery clinic, for them to have a look and I just, you know, mentioned that it was in the breast area and then he just looked and he just said “it’s not really – if you’d have been a woman and you developed a breast, that lump would be well underneath and nowhere near the breast anyway, so… but we’ll have it looked at” and he just felt around a little bit and went “mmm… I think we’ll have a scan on it”, you know, ultrasound.

 I think I made the biggest mistake that… I never really contacted the doctor earlier on. I think last year was obviously 2007 so it must have been 2006, I had sort of problems, slight problems with my left breast or my left nipple, as… I do vaguely remember that I was sort of getting, like, cysts come up, well… always happened on a Friday, always, excuse the expression, it’s Sod’s Law, it was Friday night and it used to become rather painful Saturday, Sunday would be great, Monday disappear. I took no notice of it. I thought it was like a cyst, like a spot you get on the face and it flares up and it must have been some time later, I took no notice of it, just forgot about it. Then I suppose come to 2008, February, March, April, it started to flare up again, the same cyst, and it always happened on a Thursday, Friday, I could not lie on my chest, it was painful, but couldn’t feel anything there. Then… I dismissed it. And then round about, I think, April or May, I can’t remember the exact date, I sort of felt something. Shall I, shan’t I? Then I went to see the doctor in May.

She examined me, she couldn’t find anything, and then a couple of weeks later, May, that’s the end of May, so beginning of June, it flared up again and then I could feel something. Then my wife said to me, “Look, you know, instead of leaving it, go and see the doctor, you seem to have a cyst there, it keeps going.” It may be, what, my wife had suffered always with cysts on her breasts and she’s always had it looked at and always had them drained. I thought well, possibly it’s the same sort of problem. Go along to the doctor and she examined me and she said “I don’t want to frighten you, but I don’t like, you obviously, there is something there, I’ll send you to the hospital.” 

The next morning she says, “John I’m telling you, you need to get that checked just to be on the safe side”. “Yeah, yeah, yeah”. Anyway what I didn’t know was, she’d told my daughter, and a couple of nights later, a lovely summer’s evening, I was out cutting the back lawn. And I’d got my shirt off, and my daughter came down the back path and, straight away she said, “Dad, that wants looking at,” she says “because I’m telling you straight men can get breast cancer as well as women”. So I says, “Yeah ok love, ok”. Anyway she kept on to me all that night, “Dad are you going to go to the doctors and have that looked at?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”. And I’ll tell you a funny story attached to this part, in a moment… So, a couple of more weeks probably passed and they kept on to me and I have to go to the GP’s surgery periodically to have my blood pressure checked. So the practice nurse, I said to my wife and my daughter, I says, “To keep you two quiet, I says next time I go to see the nurse, I’ll show her see what she thinks”. Anyway a few weeks later I had to go for a blood pressure check, and, the nurse, smashing girl, you know “you ok, blah blah blah ok”, “yeah” I says, “When you’ve taken my blood pressure I want to show you something see whether it’s worth bothering the doctor with”.

So anyway she took me blood pressure you know, that’s fine. She’s now “what’s the problem?” So I undid me shirt and I says, “Look at that nipple compared with that one”… So she says, “Well ok” she says, “Jump up on the bed” and she pressed and what you called it, (cough) – and I’ll never forget she says “John” she says “I think to be safe we’ll get the doctor to have a look at that, just to be on the safe side”. And it still never registered big time that it was something serious you know. I think I thoroughly expected the doctor to say, you know, that’s, that’s fine that’s no problem. Anyway she made an appointment to see my GP, [name of GP] and I went a few days later. And she, you know she says, “You’re a bit concerned about one of your nipples John” she says “Let me have a look”. She had a look, up on the bed, pressed you know, felt, by this time, the nipple had gone a little bit on the hard side compared with the other one, but it still no. So anyway she says “John” she says, “to be safe, I think we’ll send you to the hospital and get the hospital to have a look at that”. So I says, “Ok [name of GP] ok”. Anyway she says, “I’ll see to it and the hospital will be in touch with you”. Anyway I was home about two hours from the GP’s surgery and the telephone rang and it was the hospital. “Mr (Name) you saw your GP this morning”. So I said, “Yes that’s right”. She said, “Well I’ve got an appointment for you”. And then something just slightly, I thought well, ‘My God that’s very quick, you know for a hospital, normally you make an appointment and you don’t see anyone for six months or something like that’. Ok, fair enough.

So anyway she gave me the appointment, and it still never registered with me, this sounds bizarre as I say, I don’t know what was going on in my mind, certainly not breast cancer, and my wife did say that she says “John,” she says “you know, are you prepared for what you might be told at the hospital?” “Hmmm” you know. So anyway the appointment came around and we went to the hospital, saw the surgeon, he examined me and I went for a core biopsy and mammogram, what you ladies have. And he said, you know, “Ok we’ll be in touch with you”. The following week I went back and it was then that one of the consultants said, “We’ve examined your core biopsy and we’ve found that some of the cells are cancerous”. And it wasn’t until then that … ‘I have breast cancer’. And I’ll be quite honest I just bit my lip and looked at my wife and… I didn’t know what to think or say, or, or anything. 

 Well it was my daughter that noticed it first. I had banged myself a few times, you know, moving furniture and that but I thought nothing of it because you bang your leg at my age, it takes a long while for it to go away, as it were, and she noticed it. I was on the allotment. Luckily for me I was stripped to the waist. It was a beautiful day. If it had been a very cold day, I would’ve been sat in the greenhouse and she wouldn’t have seen it.

 I remember it very vividly of course. It was the weekend of the Mayday holiday and, it wasn’t me that found the lump it was my wife who… she ran her hand over my chest and found this lump. And I always remember being immediately worried about it, because I hadn’t noticed it of course. So the doctor was closed on Monday. And I went into work on Tuesday and phoned the doctor for an appointment, and went from work on that Tuesday to the doctor. And he examined me and did indeed find a lump and he didn’t seem too worried about it. And he said he would refer me to the hospital. That was fine. I left, the doctor, I didn’t go back to work I don’t think that day. Anyway the next day I spoke to a lady who had breast cancer, and asked about her experience and she told me. And eh, she said that things were really good in [area] because they did this one step clinic for people with lumps on their chest. But that- turned out only to be for women, actually. And anyway, in the interim between me going to the hospital and finding out about this lump, I became really worried about it, and I have to say in my mind it was growing all the time. And then more symptoms appeared, because I began to have this real itch in both nipples. And this lump just to the inside of one. And, I went back to the doctor, I saw a different person, who did tell me I’d been referred to the surgical clinic at the hospital, and, she told me she thought I might better stay off work, in the interim.

Well yeah I mean it was, it was so unusual in actual fact I mean I didn’t even have an inkling of anything and I was going to the doctors, ‘cos I’ve got a breathing problem, and I’d gone to him for that, and whilst we were there I said to him, “This is a bit embarrassing but...” I said, “my nipple itches”. So, and I said, “It doesn’t seem natural”. So, I mean he immediately said, “Well you realise men can get breast cancer?” So I said, “Well, yes and no” sort of thing. So he said, “I think we ought to do a biopsy”. So within a fortnight he organised for me to go and have a biopsy and a week after that they called me and said, “Yes it was definitely positive”. So, then they wanted to organise the operation but unfortunately because of my breathing they wouldn’t allow me to take the anaesthetic, so I had to wait for three months.

Well, I was on holiday in Scotland. I was fishing, and I felt a lump on me right breast, just right above the nipple. Really didn’t take much notice, coz I didn’t, obviously didn’t know that men suffered from breast cancer. I didn’t have a clue that men suffered from breast cancer, you know? But when I came back off holiday and me wife sort of said, “You’d better go and see the doctor,” which I did, he sort of, he never said what it was, but with his reaction, I virtually knew what it was, you know? But I left the doctor’s and came home. By the time I got home, [place name] Breast Unit was actually on the phone to me wife, asking me to go over to see them – so he got straight on, within half an hour of finding, you know, me going to see him. Within half an hour, he’d been on to the breast unit and they’d got straight back on to me, obviously to go for some tests, which I did. I had a mammogram, which is very uncomfortable.

So anyway I rang up my GP surgery the same day because I was very aware that if this was breast cancer I needed to do something about it straight away. And I suppose I - as you know, I've written about this. And I suppose now thinking about it, again with the benefit of hindsight, my intention in going to the GP was really for that GP to give me a referral to a hospital where I could have some sort of intervention that would explore what the problem was. I didn't expect my GP to be able to deal with it on their own. I hoped to be able to see a GP at my local surgery that I was familiar with but in fact that wasn't possible, and so I saw someone who worked part-time there, a female GP. And this was the first time that I'd met with her before. Although again, as I said in something that I've written, presumably she had access to notes. She knew I was a man of fifty presenting with a lump in his chest, she said something like ‘I'll give you antibiotics to see if it will go down’ - that's a quote. And I thought this was a bad way of proceeding.

 Say it was about 2001 approximately, about eight years ago I was… first diagnosed. I didn’t personally notice. I had sort of a… something I felt wasn’t right on me right bust and me wife then says, you know, I should go to see somebody. Before that I had, I was on warfarin then, a blood clot, and I think that’s where it really came from. When I was discharged the doctor there says, yeah, cos he had it in me notes that I’ve got an irritation on me bust and he had a look at it and he suggested that I should go to seek, seek medication, you know, which I did do, and I went with me wife to see about this. The doctor says it was nothing to be concerned about. They wouldn’t believe me at all. This was going on for quite some time. In the end me wife did come with me and she really had it out with him and it basically boiled down to, “What if it had been me as a woman coming to see you, what would you had have sent me for?” What do you call it, the word, I can’t remember the word…