A Man Recounts His Lonely Battle With Breast Cancer

James Lowery was showering the first time he felt a tiny lump under his left nipple. It didn’t hurt, and it was “pinhole-sized,” so he didn’t give it much thought.

A year later, the lump was still there, only now the skin over it was a little rough. Eventually it oozed, like a scab over a healing sore.

Still, “I didn’t have any pain,” Lowery insisted. “So I didn’t know I had a problem.”

It was a year and a half before he saw a doctor. He was stunned by the diagnosis: breast cancer.

“I said, ‘Men don’t get breast cancer,’ ” Lowery said.

But men can indeed get breast cancer--1,300 American men will get it this year alone, and it will kill 400. For unknown reasons, the incidence is rising, up from about 800 cases annually a decade ago.

That’s less than 1% of the nation’s total breast cancer cases. The disease will strike 175,000 women this year, and kill 43,000. Women have fought back with activism: Survivors wear pink ribbons and march to raise research money and urge other women to get regular mammograms.

Partly because male breast cancer is rare, men like Lowery simply never heard about it.

“Men are kind of surprised they have it, and they certainly don’t like to go public with it,” said Dr. William Donegan of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “I think in men it may be a much more private thing.”

That lack of awareness means few men see a doctor before their breast cancer has advanced, so “survival has not been as high as in women,” said Donegan, the American Cancer Society’s expert on male breast cancer.

And it meant that Lowery’s family spent hours hunting for the scarce information available on male breast cancer. Even his surgeon had had only one male patient previously. As for support groups for men, Lowery couldn’t find any.

“I did feel lonely a long, long time,” said Lowery, 74, of Mayer, Ariz. Lowery, who told his story to raise awareness for male patients, added, “My daughter and my wife have been my support group.”

The good news is that doctors do understand male breast cancer fairly well. They know that men are at increased risk if many women in their families have had breast cancer. Radiation exposure is another risk factor.

In men, tumors usually develop under the nipple, which then can become inverted, Donegan said.

Men get the same treatment as women.

For Lowery, that saga began when he mentioned a growth on his shoulder to his daughter. She thought it looked like skin cancer and insisted he see a doctor right away. Lowery turned out to have melanoma, but during that visit the doctor also spotted the lump in his left breast.

Right away, they scheduled a mastectomy. Surgeons also removed 15 lymph nodes from under his left arm that, fortunately, were cancer-free.

Then began three months of chemotherapy to target any cancer that might be roaming through his body. Lowery suffered nausea from the treatment and lost all his body hair, but recently he was declared in remission.

Much breast cancer growth is spurred by estrogen, even in men. So just like women whose tumors are “estrogen receptor positive,” he’s about to take the drug tamoxifen for the next five years in hopes of preventing a recurrence.

And like 30% of women with breast cancer, Lowery said he was diagnosed with too many copies of a gene called HER2, which can make the disease more aggressive. A new drug helps women who are HER2-positive, but Donegan said he’s not aware of its use yet in men.

Lowery now offers advice: “Men ought to do like women and check themselves.”