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Men have breast cancer scares, too.
3 years ago
General
First of all, I don't have breast cancer. (I'll abbreviate it BC.) But...in 2020, I had a serious BC scare, and needed to be screened for it. A few of my friends know about it, but it was too sensitive for me to write a journal about at the time, and for a while I stopped mentioning it altogether even to friends I hadn't told about it yet. But now I believe this silence was a mistake.
Okay, so I didn't get BC. Then why is a cancer scare such a big deal? Because people can go through as much stress thinking they might have cancer as they can actually being diagnosed with cancer. We know what cancer can do to people—they get sick; cancer likes to hide; it may not be detected in time; the cancer treatments themselves (chemotherapy, radiation, surgery) can be miserable; cancer can go successfully into remission and still relapse later. If cancer is hard on people's bodies, then the psychological aspects can be no less hard on people's minds—there's waiting; there's fear; there's uncertainty; there's worry about how it'll affect others; there's an entire field dedicated to cancer psychology. And a cancer scare is no less part of cancer stress, with the difference being that the scare could conclude either in a false alarm (no cancer), or in a real cancer diagnosis, but until then, either outcome may already be true. And regardless the outcome, by the time the scare concludes, the person may not have reached that milestone psychologically unscathed.
During the first half of 2020, during peak covid-19 lockdown, we discovered a lumpy mass embedded directly in my (male) areola. I may've had it for years, but it announced itself one day by...starting to bleed. And the bleeding just wouldn't stop, continuous at least as a slow bleed. Now, I'm no hemophiliac—this was an all-too-real tumor, and in one of the scariest possible locations to have one. We had to seriously consider that I might've developed BC.
The covid lockdown was relevant because...this was a region where most people kept refusing to wear face masks or socially distance in any way, and it goes without saying there was no vaccine yet for us or anyone else, and as such, healthcare resources were spread thin. We could still schedule an appointment, but we had to wait, and go through additional required safety measures. This part was also scary in its own way—if I had indeed developed any kind of cancer, then it would've automatically put me in the high risk category for covid, so I had to be extra careful.
And there was still the possible cancer itself to worry about. While I waited, I did some hasty reading. (Skimming, really.) And the detail that stood out most to me is that only 1% of BC cases happen in men, and as such it's overwhelmingly considered a women's disease. At the time, I assumed that, as cancer is a disease of physiology, "men" referred to the genetic distinction—people with a Y chromosome. This would prove to be false, but my misconception lingered much longer than the cancer scare itself.
There was an added social complication to a BC scare in a man:
Obviously, most of those here on FurAffinity who like beefy male artwork, are probably already well aware that men, just like women, have mammary glands—they just usually develop differently in men, and are far less noticeable than in women. But if any man has the nipples he was born with, he does have mammary glands, and it is these organs that can possibly develop BC. It's just called "breast cancer" because (1) the vast majority of BC happens to women, and (2) even men's mammaries are called "breasts" in old-fashioned language—consider terms like "breastplate."
But among the general public in much of the Western World, "breasts" are usually considered something that only women have, and which men do not have; as such, some people think of BC as something men can't get at all. Furthermore, because breasts in women are often sexualized (not every human culture actually does this), breasts are normally considered private parts. So, breasts—and therefore breast cancer—are things you don't politely discuss in mixed company. And, being a man (albeit a gay man with no interest in female mammaries), I automatically am mixed company.
So, I was strongly recommended against talking too openly or casually about BC at all, not just because it's a heavy topic for a lot of people, but because many might hear a man talking openly about breast cancer and assume he's making a callous joke about women's health as someone who isn't a woman. So, if a woman having a BC scare has to fear getting breast cancer, then a man has to fear that and additionally worry about getting punched in the face for speaking about BC in a way someone else assumes is automatically demeaning to women, or for being a man claiming at all to have or have had BC or a BC scare. Of course people should be respectful to women, but if both women and men have mammaries, then both women and men can get BC.
But my BC scare was certainly no less real than my bleeding nipple tumor that still wouldn't heal. I ended up telling some friends, certainly. But after my BC scare ended without getting BC, I generally stopped mentioning anything chest-related about my past cancer scares, even when talking to friends I hadn't told yet about my BC scare. I didn't get BC, after all, and I could still get in trouble socially for discussing it, so...I let it drop, and tried never to talk about it again.
That was a mistake. The entire reason talking about male BC is so difficult, is because all the aforementioned reasons have reinforced a social stigma against it. It may not be as common as female BC, but it still happens, and that means men can still have BC scares. And my silence only served to perpetuate the stigma. Yes, I had a real BC scare. I didn't get BC, but I could have, and that matters. I still don't know the most ideal way to discuss male BC, but all I know is my scare is not something I should hide as some kind of shameful secret.
Anyway, while I was still waiting for the day of my appointment, I still had to deal with...the very real possibility I already had BC. But why me? I had to come to terms with the fact that any BC I may've already developed, didn't care if I didn't think I was at risk because of my chromosomes. It would still be real, and I'd still have to deal with it. In hindsight, I was mentally already trying to adjust to a changed (but still unconfirmed) reality of having BC.
The day of the appointment came. The social distancing alone made the waiting room tense for me, but we finally entered an examination room. The doctor wasn't an oncologist, but a dermatologist, since I wasn't even going to see an oncologist yet until other examining doctors referred me. He examined the tumor, and said he doubted it was breast cancer. Of course, he couldn't be sure yet, and the tumor was still a bloody mess, so he surgically removed the visible tumor (and very carefully given its location), and had it sent to a lab for biopsy. This would not happen same-day, so we had to wait...longer. If it had been any kind of problem tumor that required additional treatment, there was the prospect that we had to schedule even more doctor's appointments in the wonderful world of Covidland.
Fortunately, the biopsy results didn't require another appointment, and were forwarded to us directly. ...It wasn't breast cancer. It wasn't even cancer. It was a benign strawberry hemangioma. It was a vascular tumor—that is, a tumor of the blood vessels. As it turned out, I (and most people my age) have an abundance of benign vascular tumors, mostly in the form of dot-shaped cherry angiomas. This was not one of those. A strawberry hemangioma is more bumpy and gnarled in appearance, because it's a tangle of extra lengths of tumor-grown blood vessels. The fact they can be so tangled was key to why it became a problem in the first place: The vessels had come under too much stress from their mutual entanglement and started to rupture and bleed all by themselves. I was always going to need to get this thing removed, because, even if it was benign, it still required medical attention.
Of course, when I tried to research strawberry hemangiomas, I hit a particularly bizarre information wall: These kinds of tumors are almost exclusively associated with human infants, and mostly happen to girls. As a (then) 40-year-old adult male, I was far removed from being either of those. I tried searching for more reading material about strawberry hemangiomas in adults, but in vain. Some websites even implied that strawberry hemangiomas and cherry angiomas are mutually exclusive variations of the same kind of benign tumor, with the difference being a person's age. But they're still shaped very differently, and this was no cherry. As it turned out, I did have an exceedingly rare tumor (for my age) after all.
As for my misconception about breast cancer and chromosomes, that was cleared up only much more recently, within the past few months. Sex chromosomes only play an indirect role in BC. Women indeed are overwhelmingly more likely than men to get BC, but the reason is higher levels of estrogen, a hormone both men and women have, but which mature non-menopausal women merely have a lot more of, and sex chromosomes influence the development of glands that produce more estrogen. Estrogen promotes the gender-specific development of the human body, including developing mammary glands into their more typically female form as breasts. Unfortunately, estrogen also drastically increases the risks of developing breast cancer. Men can still get BC, even at lower typically-male estrogen levels, but are just far less likely to. And higher estrogen levels may not only be produced by glands, but can come from external sources, including as a medication. I don't do that, but there's always the possibility of environmental estrogens. So, as long as estrogen levels (from whatever source) are high enough, BC risk is elevated no matter a person's sex chromosomes.
I've since had other cancer scares, approximately one a year now. But since every troubling sign has happened at skin level, whenever I talked about my cancer scares, I emphasized only this aspect of it—as far as most people knew, they were all potential skin tumors, which is correct in their location, if not necessarily in their true nature. My second cancer scare in 2021 did involve a (benign) skin tumor. But while my 2020 scare involved a tumor at skin level, neither the kind of tumor we feared it was (breast cancer), nor the kind of tumor it actually was (strawberry hemangioma), were skin cell tumors at all.
I'd known I was high risk for at least skin cancer since I was a kid—I grew up under the near-equatorial sunshine of the Marshall Islands, but I can't tan, or even spend more than a couple minutes in any direct sunlight without beginning to turn lobster-red. But now I try to be a lot more observant about any possible cancer, since I am at that age where the chances of finding cancer are increasing, and I have some family history of cancer. This is just the new normal in middle age, I guess.
Okay, so I didn't get BC. Then why is a cancer scare such a big deal? Because people can go through as much stress thinking they might have cancer as they can actually being diagnosed with cancer. We know what cancer can do to people—they get sick; cancer likes to hide; it may not be detected in time; the cancer treatments themselves (chemotherapy, radiation, surgery) can be miserable; cancer can go successfully into remission and still relapse later. If cancer is hard on people's bodies, then the psychological aspects can be no less hard on people's minds—there's waiting; there's fear; there's uncertainty; there's worry about how it'll affect others; there's an entire field dedicated to cancer psychology. And a cancer scare is no less part of cancer stress, with the difference being that the scare could conclude either in a false alarm (no cancer), or in a real cancer diagnosis, but until then, either outcome may already be true. And regardless the outcome, by the time the scare concludes, the person may not have reached that milestone psychologically unscathed.
During the first half of 2020, during peak covid-19 lockdown, we discovered a lumpy mass embedded directly in my (male) areola. I may've had it for years, but it announced itself one day by...starting to bleed. And the bleeding just wouldn't stop, continuous at least as a slow bleed. Now, I'm no hemophiliac—this was an all-too-real tumor, and in one of the scariest possible locations to have one. We had to seriously consider that I might've developed BC.
The covid lockdown was relevant because...this was a region where most people kept refusing to wear face masks or socially distance in any way, and it goes without saying there was no vaccine yet for us or anyone else, and as such, healthcare resources were spread thin. We could still schedule an appointment, but we had to wait, and go through additional required safety measures. This part was also scary in its own way—if I had indeed developed any kind of cancer, then it would've automatically put me in the high risk category for covid, so I had to be extra careful.
And there was still the possible cancer itself to worry about. While I waited, I did some hasty reading. (Skimming, really.) And the detail that stood out most to me is that only 1% of BC cases happen in men, and as such it's overwhelmingly considered a women's disease. At the time, I assumed that, as cancer is a disease of physiology, "men" referred to the genetic distinction—people with a Y chromosome. This would prove to be false, but my misconception lingered much longer than the cancer scare itself.
There was an added social complication to a BC scare in a man:
Obviously, most of those here on FurAffinity who like beefy male artwork, are probably already well aware that men, just like women, have mammary glands—they just usually develop differently in men, and are far less noticeable than in women. But if any man has the nipples he was born with, he does have mammary glands, and it is these organs that can possibly develop BC. It's just called "breast cancer" because (1) the vast majority of BC happens to women, and (2) even men's mammaries are called "breasts" in old-fashioned language—consider terms like "breastplate."
But among the general public in much of the Western World, "breasts" are usually considered something that only women have, and which men do not have; as such, some people think of BC as something men can't get at all. Furthermore, because breasts in women are often sexualized (not every human culture actually does this), breasts are normally considered private parts. So, breasts—and therefore breast cancer—are things you don't politely discuss in mixed company. And, being a man (albeit a gay man with no interest in female mammaries), I automatically am mixed company.
So, I was strongly recommended against talking too openly or casually about BC at all, not just because it's a heavy topic for a lot of people, but because many might hear a man talking openly about breast cancer and assume he's making a callous joke about women's health as someone who isn't a woman. So, if a woman having a BC scare has to fear getting breast cancer, then a man has to fear that and additionally worry about getting punched in the face for speaking about BC in a way someone else assumes is automatically demeaning to women, or for being a man claiming at all to have or have had BC or a BC scare. Of course people should be respectful to women, but if both women and men have mammaries, then both women and men can get BC.
But my BC scare was certainly no less real than my bleeding nipple tumor that still wouldn't heal. I ended up telling some friends, certainly. But after my BC scare ended without getting BC, I generally stopped mentioning anything chest-related about my past cancer scares, even when talking to friends I hadn't told yet about my BC scare. I didn't get BC, after all, and I could still get in trouble socially for discussing it, so...I let it drop, and tried never to talk about it again.
That was a mistake. The entire reason talking about male BC is so difficult, is because all the aforementioned reasons have reinforced a social stigma against it. It may not be as common as female BC, but it still happens, and that means men can still have BC scares. And my silence only served to perpetuate the stigma. Yes, I had a real BC scare. I didn't get BC, but I could have, and that matters. I still don't know the most ideal way to discuss male BC, but all I know is my scare is not something I should hide as some kind of shameful secret.
Anyway, while I was still waiting for the day of my appointment, I still had to deal with...the very real possibility I already had BC. But why me? I had to come to terms with the fact that any BC I may've already developed, didn't care if I didn't think I was at risk because of my chromosomes. It would still be real, and I'd still have to deal with it. In hindsight, I was mentally already trying to adjust to a changed (but still unconfirmed) reality of having BC.
The day of the appointment came. The social distancing alone made the waiting room tense for me, but we finally entered an examination room. The doctor wasn't an oncologist, but a dermatologist, since I wasn't even going to see an oncologist yet until other examining doctors referred me. He examined the tumor, and said he doubted it was breast cancer. Of course, he couldn't be sure yet, and the tumor was still a bloody mess, so he surgically removed the visible tumor (and very carefully given its location), and had it sent to a lab for biopsy. This would not happen same-day, so we had to wait...longer. If it had been any kind of problem tumor that required additional treatment, there was the prospect that we had to schedule even more doctor's appointments in the wonderful world of Covidland.
Fortunately, the biopsy results didn't require another appointment, and were forwarded to us directly. ...It wasn't breast cancer. It wasn't even cancer. It was a benign strawberry hemangioma. It was a vascular tumor—that is, a tumor of the blood vessels. As it turned out, I (and most people my age) have an abundance of benign vascular tumors, mostly in the form of dot-shaped cherry angiomas. This was not one of those. A strawberry hemangioma is more bumpy and gnarled in appearance, because it's a tangle of extra lengths of tumor-grown blood vessels. The fact they can be so tangled was key to why it became a problem in the first place: The vessels had come under too much stress from their mutual entanglement and started to rupture and bleed all by themselves. I was always going to need to get this thing removed, because, even if it was benign, it still required medical attention.
Of course, when I tried to research strawberry hemangiomas, I hit a particularly bizarre information wall: These kinds of tumors are almost exclusively associated with human infants, and mostly happen to girls. As a (then) 40-year-old adult male, I was far removed from being either of those. I tried searching for more reading material about strawberry hemangiomas in adults, but in vain. Some websites even implied that strawberry hemangiomas and cherry angiomas are mutually exclusive variations of the same kind of benign tumor, with the difference being a person's age. But they're still shaped very differently, and this was no cherry. As it turned out, I did have an exceedingly rare tumor (for my age) after all.
As for my misconception about breast cancer and chromosomes, that was cleared up only much more recently, within the past few months. Sex chromosomes only play an indirect role in BC. Women indeed are overwhelmingly more likely than men to get BC, but the reason is higher levels of estrogen, a hormone both men and women have, but which mature non-menopausal women merely have a lot more of, and sex chromosomes influence the development of glands that produce more estrogen. Estrogen promotes the gender-specific development of the human body, including developing mammary glands into their more typically female form as breasts. Unfortunately, estrogen also drastically increases the risks of developing breast cancer. Men can still get BC, even at lower typically-male estrogen levels, but are just far less likely to. And higher estrogen levels may not only be produced by glands, but can come from external sources, including as a medication. I don't do that, but there's always the possibility of environmental estrogens. So, as long as estrogen levels (from whatever source) are high enough, BC risk is elevated no matter a person's sex chromosomes.
I've since had other cancer scares, approximately one a year now. But since every troubling sign has happened at skin level, whenever I talked about my cancer scares, I emphasized only this aspect of it—as far as most people knew, they were all potential skin tumors, which is correct in their location, if not necessarily in their true nature. My second cancer scare in 2021 did involve a (benign) skin tumor. But while my 2020 scare involved a tumor at skin level, neither the kind of tumor we feared it was (breast cancer), nor the kind of tumor it actually was (strawberry hemangioma), were skin cell tumors at all.
I'd known I was high risk for at least skin cancer since I was a kid—I grew up under the near-equatorial sunshine of the Marshall Islands, but I can't tan, or even spend more than a couple minutes in any direct sunlight without beginning to turn lobster-red. But now I try to be a lot more observant about any possible cancer, since I am at that age where the chances of finding cancer are increasing, and I have some family history of cancer. This is just the new normal in middle age, I guess.
