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Male Breast Cancer: A Wife's Perspective
Stephanie Kane
We discovered John's cancer purely by chance. Lying in bed next to him one night, I noticed him scratching his right nipple. He said it was nothing, then admitted it had been bothering him for a couple of months. There was a hard lump and nothing like it on the left side. When he returned from work the next evening, he said he didn't have time to call the doctor. I made the appointment and dragged him to our family practitioner the next day.
We quickly came to realize that statistics were meaningless. Our family doctor said he was 99% sure it wasn't cancer, but referred John for a biopsy. The surgeon said he was 99% sure it was benign but wanted to take it out. After going in and discovering that the lump was cancer, he told us he was 99% sure it wouldn't kill John. This time the statistic was no comfort at all. A mastectomy was scheduled.
We went home that night in total shock. John looked at me with teary eyes and said, "I don't want to die. I'm not ready." We called his sister in California. She was silent for a full minute. When she finally spoke, her reaction set the tone for how we would face what lay ahead: "No matter what happens, we'll get through this with class." The only time I remember breaking down was a couple of days later, our first time apart since receiving the news. Alone in my car, I fell to pieces at a stoplight.
At first I wanted to protect John from the phone calls that were flooding in. In seeking reassurance and expressing their own fears, I was afraid others would deplete him. I was wrong. The loving concern of friends and strangers did at least as much for him as the excellent medical care he received. Those e-mails and calls made John feel he wasn't alone, wasn't abandoned. That he was still part of the world.
There never was a moment when either of us thought "why him?" or "why us?" John's attitude is defiance: get over it and get on with life. I'm grateful we caught it early, by chance. I've gotten over the shock but not the sense of unreality. There was no time to ruminate or for paralysis to set in. If that's denial, it's a healthy kind: the refusal to believe I could lose him.
Cancer is an uninvited houseguest who keeps stealing things. John had pooh-poohed the risk of lymphedema. When he was vaccinated for a trip in March, a nurse noticed swelling. That's the one time I've seen him angry. The six-inch scar on his chest means nothing. That he can't bench press 415 pounds anymore is what makes cancer real; although he's never mourned his own mortality, that loss John mourns. He sees a physical therapist now to learn how to exercise safely and wears a bracelet on his right wrist warning not to take blood pressure or draw blood from that arm. He even sleeps with it on.
At 67, John is growing in unexpected ways. He's always been gregarious and lived larger than life, but I'd never seen him approach a complete stranger and strike up a conversation. Last night in a restaurant we saw a young woman at the next table wearing a bandanna to cover her baldness. John went up to her and said we were out celebrating the one-year anniversary of his diagnosis, that he was fine and she would be too.
And I believe that.