Appreciate your interest Chris.
My journey began a few months before my 61st birthday when I felt a hard BB sized pimple-like mass in my left breast. After a couple months of keeping an eye on it, I scheduled an appointment with my primary to address another unrelated issue and asked that he have a look at the “pimple”. Going in I suspected it may possibly be a problem as I had heard during Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns the caveat “and men can get it too”. That began the journey of navigating what is primarily a woman’s world, a world that I think many male breast cancer patients are embarrassed to be in (not me though, I’m in good company).
5 years have passed since my diagnosis. In that time some of the “roadblocks” have been sitting for over two hours in a room secluded from the women’s area in Mayo waiting to be cleared to go after a mammogram (they forgot I was there), issues with Medicare covering an annual mammogram (I suspect a coding issue by Mayo), and the problem with FDA not approving the Breast Cancer Index for men.
I am a volunteer on the Pink Ribbon Mentor team in Rochester, but of the 1% of all breast cancer patients, only two men over the past few years have reached out.