Epress.am News from Armenia
When Mark Doel first noticed spots of blood on his bedsheets, he was not unduly concerned.
Even when a work colleague pointed out that he had a couple of specks on his shirt, the keen badminton player assumed it was dry skin or that he was rubbing against his shirt during sport.
After several months, he visited his GP, who agreed it was probably a skin condition and prescribed cream to help.
In fact, Doel had breast cancer.
“I had no idea men could get this,” says Doel, 41, an IT analyst who lives with his wife Despo, also 41, and children Christian, 10, and Chloe, 7, in Surrey, the UK.
“There was a huge embarrassment factor. It took a while for me to be able to talk about it to anyone. If it had been lung or brain cancer, I could have been more open about it. But there’s a stigma that breast cancer is for women. When I told work I was ill, I couldn’t say the words ‘breast cancer,’ I could only say: ‘I have cancer in my chest’.”
Doel’s cancer was the very early form, ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), the most common type that forms in the duct of the nipple.
Though these breast cells are cancerous, Mail Online reports, they are described by doctors as pre-cancerous because they are contained within the duct and have not started spreading.
“Strictly speaking, it’s not cancer because by definition, cancer means something that will spread to another part of the body. However, DCIS will eventually become cancerous if you don’t treat it, so it’s very important to get it early,” said consultant breast surgeon Dibyesh Banerjee who Doel went to see.
Doel was scheduled for mastectomy surgery two days later.
Most male breast cancers are treated in this way — removing the whole breast rather than just a lumpectomy — because there is less tissue in the area than in a woman’s breast.
Physically, Doel recovered well — the cancer had not spread and he did not need chemotherapy or radiotherapy. But the emotional fallout was only just beginning.
“A few days after the all clear it was like bang! The stress just hit me,” he says. “I’d kept going through the diagnosis and operation, but afterwards I had to take a couple of months off work because I was an emotional wreck.”
At first, Doel found it difficult discussing the disease with anyone, and suffered nightmares and sleepless nights for two years after his treatment. Gradually however, he has been able to be more open.
“Sometimes children spot it on the beach and say: ‘What happened to you?’ But that doesn’t bother me. If one little scar means I have more time with my wife and children, that’s not really much of a price to pay,” he says.