‘Stand by Her’: A breast cancer guide for men

Breast cancer may be a woman’s disease, but it also profoundly affects the lives of countless men. Just ask author John Anderson. His wife, sister, mother and mother’s best friend all were diagnosed with breast cancer, and his close encounters with this disease prompted him to write the book “Stand by Her: A Breast Cancer Guide for Men.” Here is an excerpt.

The abyss
You’re never ready when “it” happens.

“I have breast cancer.”

“It’s malignant.”

“They want to take my breasts.”

“I need chemo.”

“I have to get radiation.”

Your world has just gone black. She’s been diagnosed with breast cancer and you’ve just been dropped into a bottomless abyss.

. . .

Sharon had it all. She was a successful creative director at a boutique advertising agency located in the hip SoHo section of New York City. Her client list included Coca-Cola, Colgate, CBS, the New York Yankees, MTV Networks, and USA Today. She was happily married to her business partner, with a nice house in Westchester County, New York, which was constantly consumed by laughter from her two young boys, Seth and Isaac, ages 7 and 5.

She was very excited about her latest client conquest, Lifetime Television. Sharon had been put in charge of creating a breast cancer public service campaign for the cable TV network, designed to encourage women to get yearly checkups from their doctors, have mammograms, and do monthly self-exams. Sharon learned during the creative briefing that one in eight women in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer every year. The statistic made her stop and think: Which of her friends would be the unlucky one?

At 41, Sharon had never had a mammogram. Women are encouraged to have their first breast screening by age 40, with some studies recommending as young as 35. Not to worry, Sharon thought. No one in my family has ever had breast cancer. Then she read that 85 percent of women who get breast cancer have no family history of it — just like her. Sharon crammed in a mammogram appointment to be just before she picked up her oldest child from elementary school. The actual visit was painless (other than the way they squished her breasts onto the machine, which hurt — a lot, actually). So, another to-do item had been crossed off her busy list. The phone rang several days later. The mammogram center name and number popped up on Sharon’s caller ID: “We found an abnormality.”

Abnormalities, it turns out, aren’t that abnormal. Plenty of women are “diagnosed” every day with innocent, benign cysts in their breasts. That’s what the mammogram center told her, before they recommended a breast surgeon in New York City who could take a biopsy of her suspicious lump. The first biopsy procedure Sharon had — fine needle aspiration, or FNA, as the docs like to call it — is quite simple: numb the area around the concerned spot, insert a very small needle, extract some cells, and test the suspected cells to see if they are cancerous. The surgeon decided to go one step further and do a core biopsy, which is similar to the fine needle procedure but uses a larger needle. Her biopsy results came back several days later: both inconclusive.

So the surgeon ordered a surgical lumpectomy to completely remove what he believed to be just a benign cyst. A frozen section was taken while Sharon was under general anesthesia. Still, nothing

to worry about, she thought. While getting dressed after the procedure, the medical staff told Sharon that the surgeon needed to speak with her. It was then that Sharon first began to wonder — what if.

When she was called into her doctor’s office, the surgeon was on the phone, chatting away about an upcoming medical seminar that he was heading to in Ecuador, where he would teach one day and then spend the rest of his time on pristine golf courses framed by the Andes Mountains.

Sharon sat and listened as the surgeon bantered on about his golf short game. It made her relax. If he’s more concerned about his sand wedge than her lump, she thought, surely everything was fine — just as it always had been. But the longer the phone call lasted, the more annoyed Sharon got sitting there, waiting, alongside her husband. Sharon had to get back to work on that breast cancer campaign to help all those women who were fighting breast cancer. Mustering up her best glare face, the surgeon got the message and hung up the phone. He looked at Sharon, and only at Sharon. He didn’t acknowledge her husband at all.

“It’s malignant.”

Sharon is my wife.

. . .

Anne worked as an emergency room nurse. Everything and anything having to do with trauma came right to her in the ER: motorcycle accidents, newborn babies, heart attacks, strokes, brain aneurysms — the works. She loved the excitement and challenges she faced at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Sure, emergencies were stressful, but what a rush, she thought. To calm down after each shift, Anne lit up a cigarette, and on more eventful days, two or three during her ride home from the hospital.

One day, Anne got a call from her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, who needed medical help with her ailing husband, Jim. Upon entering the house, Anne heard a dreadful rattling sound, followed by an endless barrage of coughing and hacking. When Anne walked into Jim’s bedroom, she saw the tent — an oxygen tent — under which Jim’s terrified eyes met hers. He was suffocating, thanks to an incurable bout of emphysema.

Anne helped Jim clear his lungs of phlegm, then upped the oxygen level in the tent. Upon returning to her house, Anne went straight for her cigarette carton, tossed it in the trash can, and then sought out each of her three young boys — hugging each of them so tightly they could barely breathe. She swore never to smoke again. The next day, she quit her job at the ER and decided that her job for the rest of her life was to be a great mom.

Ten years later, Anne gave birth to her seventh child — a boy. There was no more room in her tiny three-bedroom, split-level house to fit her five other sons, one daughter, and husband, Bill. So Anne and Bill built a brand-new house just outside of town in one of those new developments where her kids could run wild and free in hundreds of wooded acres in back of their house. Even though Anne no longer worked at the hospital, she found a lot of reasons to visit the ER regularly. There was always a child dropping out of a tree, being cut by a knife, getting pushed down the stairs, blowing up firecrackers in his hands, melting plastic army men with gasoline, or falling off a bike when the speedometer hit 40 mph and the handlebars couldn’t hold the road any longer.

Anne loved her life despite the daily madness of raising seven children. After her husband landed a big promotion as plant manager for a large chemical company on the East Coast, she looked forward to their country club cocktails every weekend after a long week of child chaos. When her youngest trotted off to elementary school, Anne enjoyed the sudden quiet in her house. But it didn’t last long. The house was too quiet. So Anne signed up to be a nurse at a preschool nursery. One day, while holding her hands above her head to adjust her crisp white nursing cap, Anne felt a hot flash streak across her chest. Opening her blouse, she saw a huge red blotch splattered across her left breast. When she touched it, her face blanched. She felt a lump, and it was big.

Anne called her best friend to be by her side when she went in for surgery to remove the lump. Anne signed some forms, one of which said that if the surgeon found a malignant tumor, her breast would be removed. This was what doctors did back in 1978, before mammograms, sonograms, MRIs, or CAT and PET scans existed. As Anne was being sedated, she said a prayer. A devout Catholic, she prayed to St. John Neumann, an American saint credited for starting the first Catholic parochial schools in the United States. Then she stopped, in mid-prayer, and laughed because she was praying to a celibate priest to protect her bosom.

When Anne awoke in the recovery room after her operation, the first face she saw was her friend’s, spattered with tears. Her friend gently took Anne’s hand and placed it on Anne’s left breast. Anne felt nothing. Her breast was gone. Anne had breast cancer; her tumor was the size of a walnut. Anne’s survival prognosis was dismal. Her doctors gave her six months to live, tops.

Anne was my mom.

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