Page 300 - She's One Crazy Lady!

One day, we were standing in the ASDA supermarket in Corby, selling our badges when a man suddenly came up to me and announced:
“I’m a lottery winner!”
You could imagine what was going through my mind. Were we going to be given a good donation? Calmly, I said,
“I’ve never met a lottery winner before.”
He must have realised what I was thinking.
“No”, he said, “I’m not a lottery winner in the way you think; I’m a lottery winner in that I’m a man and I have breast cancer.”
“Oh!”, I exclaimed, “I’ve never a met a man with breast cancer before,” I asked him when he was diagnosed.
“Bryan” agreed to tell me his story for us to include in one of our newsletters and as a feature in the Evening Telegraph as he felt strongly that men should be made aware of the disease as much as women. Male breast cancer may be rare but it can happen – men can get breast cancer.
Bryan had found a lump under his nipple and thought he’d better get it checked out at the doctors. He was told it just a fatty tissue. Over the next couple of years the lump got bigger and began to hurt and it wasn’t until he knocked it and it really hurt that he went back to the doctor where he was sent to hospital for an ultrasound and biopsy. Bryan told me his legs went like jelly when he was told he had breast cancer and was booked in for a mastectomy. He said the only thing that bothered him was losing his nipple. (He did and a couple of years later had a nipple tattooed on telling me he was a swimmer and a marathon runner and didn’t want to draw attention to himself). Following his mastectomy Bryan had six months of chemotherapy and twenty sessions of radiotherapy – stopping off for a well-earned pint after each session!
What was interesting was Bryan telling me people, even his friends, didn’t know what to say to him and like us, he was a keen advocate for getting men to talk about it. He also, jokingly, complained that in the waiting areas of the hospitals all the magazines were for women!
I was to meet two more men with breast cancer.
Yes, our merchandise certainly helped to raise our profile and got our name out there. I was always very proud when we set up our stalls, meeting so many people and seeing our volunteers engaged in conversations with people – and patients. We soon realised that running a charity like ours was not always about ‘money’ – ‘people talking’ was becoming far more important!
“I’m not a lottery winner in the way you think; I’m a lottery winner in that I’m a man and I have breast cancer.
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