A dad who didn’t realise men could get breast cancer has shared how he was hit with a shock diagnosis.
Gordon Allen, 61, was rushed to Salford Royal in an air ambulance in 2006 after suffering an asthma attack, but when doctors saw his chest they did further tests.
He said he "couldn't believe it" when he got his diagnosis of stage two breast cancer.
At the time Gordon was 45 and says there was little information out there on male breast cancer.
He told the Manchester Evening News his boss even questioned it until he saw paperwork.
Gordon, from Swinton, Manchester, is now speaking out about his diagnosis in a bid to make men aware that it can happen to them as well as women.
He is speaking out as part of the Men Get Breast Cancer Too campaign from charity Walk the Walk this male breast cancer awareness week.
Eight months before his asthma attack, Gordon, who has one daughter with his wife Jayne, noticed changes to his left nipple.
He felt pain, it had inverted and it had begun to crumble.
“I didn’t go to the doctors to get it checked,” he told the Manchester Evening News.
“I thought it looked odd, particularly when it went hard and started to flake.
“But there was no publicity back then, it was the last thing I thought it was.
“It might seem strange but I never knew men could get it and so it never occurred to me that’s what it was.”
Despite being fit to go home from the hospital a few days later following his asthma attack, Gordon was aware something wasn’t right when they made him stay.
He underwent a mammogram and biopsy and was then told the shocking news.
“Once I got to the hospital, they took one look at my chest and hit the roof,” Gordon said.
“They weren’t saying a great deal to me but my sister was an orderly nurse at the hospital – she did a bit of asking around for me and I got the impression from her that there was potentially something serious going on with my breast.
“When they eventually told me, I couldn’t believe it. But I felt fairly calm about it.”
Gordon credits this outlook to his Christian faith, feeling that it was up to God whether he lived or not, as well as a male nurse that helped him.
“When everyone had left, I couldn’t help but just stare at the ceiling, I couldn’t get my head around it.
“But this wonderful male nurse came and said to me, ‘well you know what it is now, the next thing is treatment.’
“And I thought, ‘he’s right. There’s no point getting all worked up, let’s get on with it and see if we can get it dealt with’.”
Gordon's close friends and family were supportive of what he was facing but he says he felt stigma over his condition from his boss in the motor trade.
Within 10 days of being diagnosed, he had a mastectomy to remove his breast and had to have time off from his job.
“I hadn’t worked there very long which didn’t help,” Gordon continued.
“He wouldn’t [his boss] believe it until I brought the paperwork in. He questioned, ‘you’ve got breast cancer? Men don’t get breast cancer. I’ve never heard of that’.
“And then when I went back to work after my breast op, he never spoke to me again. Just passed by me and never talked to me.”
Gordon didn’t need chemotherapy or radiotherapy and recovered well from the surgery, however was put on hormone therapy Tamoxifen.
In the months to follow, Gordon learnt the reality of how rare it was to have breast cancer as a man, and still to this day hasn’t met another man in person with the same condition.
In the UK, around 370 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, and around 80 of these men will die each year.
That’s almost a quarter at 22 per cent.
As with women, it usually affects older men aged 60 and above, however it can be found in men of any age, like Gordon in his mid-forties, who also has no history of breast cancer in his family.
When he would attend routine GP appointments to check how he was doing on the treatment, he found he caught the attention of student doctors, who would come into his appointments often.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of these doctors, five years in training, that didn’t have a clue what it was, they didn’t realise it was breast cancer," Gordon said.
Gordon felt like a ‘guinea pig’ at times, as he was one of the first men to go on the hormone therapy.
His wife argues that it caused him to have mood swings at certain times of the month, similarly to PMT - premenstrual syndrome - when he first started out.
And after seven years, he was able to come off it, though Gordon found this ‘frightening’.
“It was a crutch in a way, so it was quite scary coming off it,” he said.
“I thought that was going to protect me. It was down to my body then, no more medicine, which was rather frightening.”
Whilst Gordon came off medication for the cancer, he was still on antidepressants as he battled with the aftershock of what had happened to him.
Ever since the trauma, he’s regularly checked his remaining breast and around his scar, and encourages other men to do the same.
Looking back, Gordon believes he’s lucky to be alive.
He added: “I was lucky because I did nothing about it and it was just a bit of luck with the asthma attack.
“I can’t believe how daft I was and blasé that I didn’t do anything about it. If I was left to my own devices I would have died, no question.
“I want to get the message over to many men as possible that you can get breast cancer and also for men going through it, it’s not necessarily a death sentence.
“Any change at all, get to the doctors immediately, don’t mess around”.
To find out more about Walk the Walk’s awareness campaign, go to www.walkthewalk.org/mengetbreastcancertoo.
