Man with breast cancer in ‘check it out’ plea to others
IN A one-piece Victorian bathing suit, complete with false moustache, Mark Hunt sashayed down a catwalk in London last week.
He was just one of two brave men who volunteered to take part in the Breast Cancer Care show at Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. While thousands of women applied, there were virtually no male applicants.
But that is not surprising, given how rare the disease is in men. There are just 390 new cases in the UK each year, compared to nearly 55,000 in women.
When the 57-year-old senior managing director of forensic accountancy firm FTI Consulting discovered a lump in his chest in 2015, he did what “virtually all” men do “ignore it and hope it will go away”.
Months passed before the father of two, who lives near Harrogate, finally went to see his GP, on the insistence of his wife Fiona.
“Within eight days the results came back – it was breast cancer – and within four days I had a mastectomy and a lymphadenectomy, in which all the lymph nodes were removed,” he said.
While the surgery was successful, several weeks later a second scan revealed the cancer had spread to his lungs and bones.
Mr Hunt does not mince his words: the cancer is “incurable and inoperable” and the drugs he is on “can only contain the cancer. They can stop it getting worse, but like any drug, its effectiveness wears off and at that point the cancer starts to take over”.
He added: “There are two ways you can deal with it, you think about it all the time and it affects and changes your life. I’ve had the opposite strategy – it is not going to change one iota – apart from not playing tennis, because of the surgery.”
The experience of finding himself on the catwalk was “absolutely brilliant.”
His message to men who fear they have breast cancer is: “Don’t do what men do and think ‘just leave it a month or two and it will go away’.”