Pam Kingsley was brushing water off her husband’s chest as he came out of the pool when she felt a small lump.
She insisted he get it checked out, and they later discovered that Rollie Kingsley, a then 28-year-old “six-foot-two lumberjack man with a walrus mustache” had breast cancer.
“A lot of men automatically think it’s a death sentence,” said Pam Kingsley, of Towson.
“And I thought, ‘I am going to be a widow at 28.’”
Rollie Kingsley lived 31 years after his diagnosis, eventually succumbing to the disease in April. Now Pam Kingsley wants men to know breast cancer isn’t a woman’s just disease.
Men account for 1 percent of all new breast cancer patients each year, which is about 2,000 cases. Because of the rare occurrence, men are rarely a target of pink-ribbon campaigns or walks for the cure.
But, as Kingsley put it, “If you can save one life because of what happened to him, then fantastic.”
Male breast cancer used to be thought of as more virulent, but that’s because it tends to be diagnosed later, said Dr. Robert Donegan, a medical oncologist at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center.
There is far less awareness about male breast cancer among health care providers and patients, Donegan said.
“People don’t think about it,” he said.
The prognosis and treatments tend to be the same for men, although men more often get full mastectomies to remove the tumor.
“We take what we have learned in the treatment of women and apply the same principles to male breast cancer,” Donegan said.
However, there have been very few trials involving men, and many studies have excluded men, said Dr. Katherine Rak Tkaczuk, director of the Breast Evaluation and Treatment Program at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center.
“We don’t have very many large studies of this in males, because it’s a rare disease,” she said.
Routine screening for all men might not be reasonable, but men with a family history of breast cancer should consider testing for the associated genes, Donegan said.
Dr. Diana Griffiths, medical director of the Breast Center at St. Agnes Hospital, said men should at least be aware breast cancer is a possibility, and “if they do find something, they should get it checked out.”
Breast cancer brings a different stigma for men, who tend to be embarrassed about the diagnosis and less vocal, advocates said.
“I hesitated to tell people I had breast cancer. It didn’t sound very manly,” said Mark Henry, a 66-year-old breast cancer survivor and GBMC patient who lives in Hanover, Pa.
The “macho factor” gets in the way of many men talking about it, said Mark Goldstein, a New Jersey-based survivor and advocate.
Goldstein wants to see more literature in doctor’s offices and have breast exams included during prostate exams.
He said, “Men should not die of breast cancer out of ignorance.”
