“My mother always told me I was special, but she never said how special,” said Steve Brown with a laugh.
In a more solemn tone, the Winona resident added, “That’s the thing about it. Nobody thinks they are going to be that person, and it turned out I was that person.”
Brown was diagnosed with male breast cancer in February 2015.
Breast cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer death among women, is extremely rare in men. Fewer than 1 percent of all breast cancer cases develop in men, and only one in a thousand men will ever be diagnosed with it, according to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
{{tncms-inline alignment="left" content="<p>&bull;&nbsp;All people, whether male or female, are born with some breast cells and tissue. Even though males do not develop milk-producing breasts, a man&rsquo;s breast cells and tissue can still develop cancer. <br />&bull;&nbsp;Male breast cancer is very rare. Fewer than 1 percent of all breast cancer cases develop in men, and only one in a thousand men will ever be diagnosed with breast cancer.<br />&bull;&nbsp;Male breast cancer can exhibit the same symptoms as breast cancer in women, including a lump. <br />&bull;&nbsp;Anyone who notices anything unusual about their breasts, whether male or female, should contact their physician immediately. <br />&bull; Survival rates and treatment for men with breast cancer are very similar to those for women. Early detection of breast cancer increases treatment options and often reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer.</p>" id="c7220fef-4dda-4b9a-a63b-77ef8cf83073" style-type="question" title="Did You Know?" type="relcontent"}}
Brown was that one in a thousand.
“When I had it, I looked at some statistics and found out about 20 men in Mississippi had it and only 2,100 in America get breast cancer in a year,” he said.
Brown is a Winona native. After college, he lived in Connecticut, Dallas, Jackson and Memphis. He moved back to his hometown about 25 years ago. He and his wife, Debbie, have two daughters, Ashlyn Matthews and Jennie Hand, and an 8-month-old grandson, Owen Matthews.
Brown, 55, works as an insurance agent at Wellington Associates in Winona and co-owns a disaster remediation and restoration business, Sure Restore.
His story with breast cancer started three years before his diagnosis.
“I noticed a knot in my chest while I was working on the farm,” he said. “I picked something up that was pressed against my chest, and I felt a pinch in there. It felt like a little piece of gravel inside my chest.”
Brown said he didn’t feel worried or think much about it.
“I get nicks and cuts and all that stuff,” he said. “I’m one of those guys who’s always got something. I played rugby for 16 years, so I’ve had all kinds of ailments and injuries.”
Over time, Brown started noticing that the knot was growing, but he still didn’t worry much.
“The real interesting thing is that I knew there was such a thing as male breast cancer, and it was closer to me than most people,” he said.
Brown’s sister’s brother-in-law had breast cancer.
“I would hear about his fight with breast cancer, and his was pretty rough,” Brown said. “He had surgery, and his cancer came back a year or two later, and he died.”
While hearing about his sister’s brother-in-law, he knew he had that knot in his chest.
“My sister told me about what all he was going through, and I still didn’t go to the doctor,” Brown said.
The only other person who knew about the knot was Brown’s wife, because it was becoming physically noticeable.
“It wasn’t bad, but eventually it did get to be a pretty good size,” he said.
The wake-up call for Brown happened while he was visiting the Wellington Associates office in Jackson. He was motivating a young man who is an employee at the Jackson office.
“He played college baseball, and he was sitting and had a baseball in his hand, and I kind of irritated him,” said Brown “He just took that ball and hit me dead on it. I mean dead center on that thing.”
Brown just brushed it off. But when the other employee left the room, he looked inside his shirt.
“It split the skin,” he said. “The knot was pressing so tight against my skin that it broke skin, and it was bleeding.”
That night he told his wife what had happened.
“My wife saw it and said, “Are you finally going to go the doctor and get that thing checked out?’”
At that point, Brown said, “I figured I probably did have something bad, but I just didn’t want to believe it.”
He opted to go directly to a specialist in Starkville at a clinic his daughter had recommended, the Breast Health Center.
“I just kind of had that feeling,” he said.
He sat in the waiting room surrounded by women who seemed curious as to why he was there.
“It was all women and lots of pink,” he said.
At one point to make the women stop staring, he jokingly said he was there to interview for a mammography job.
“Nobody looked at me after that,” he said with a laugh.
Because male breast cancer is so rare, the doctor told Brown that what he had was most likely an abscess and performed a biopsy of the mass.
He remembers clearly when he got the call with the results of the biopsy.
“I was on the porch, and it was snowing ... I was just sitting out on the porch with my feet up watching the snow and petting my dog. The phone rang, and it was Oktibbeha County Hospital on the caller ID. The doctor said, ‘Mr. Brown, you have cancer.’ I said, ‘Well, son of a gun.’”
Brown was diagnosed with classic breast cancer, which is what most women typically get, at Stage IIB.
“It was getting critical,” he said “I was right at the edge.”
Brown had to have a mastectomy and undergo testing to see if he had the gene for breast cancer. The test came back negative. Brown also said he has no family history of breast cancer.
“The cancer had not spread anywhere, and it was all contained,” he said. “It was like 2.7 centimeters across, so it was pretty good size.”
Because male breast cancer is so rare, his doctor recommended chemotherapy. He had four rounds of chemo about three weeks apart.
“In the whole ordeal, going three years without tending to it, I got lucky that it had not spread,” said Brown.
A co-worker told Brown one day that he was the perfect man to get breast cancer.
Brown’s a rough-and-tumble kind of guy. As a sports fan, an athlete and an avid hunter, Brown has always been a guy’s guy, and no one has ever questioned his toughness.
“I played rugby until I was 40 years old, and I was out there fighting and wrestling with guys half my age, and still I would go out and play tackle football today at 55 years old if somebody would play with me.”
His colleague said to him, “Maybe this will make other men go get checked out.”
“A lot of men think of breast cancer as a female illness or ‘I’m so ashamed. If I’ve got this knot, I’m not about to go have this checked out,’” said Brown. “If I can get it, any man can.”
Today, Brown is cancer-free and his prognosis is good. He continues to see the doctor every six months. Since the cancer was caused by estrogen, which both women and men produce, Brown takes a medication that suppresses estrogen production.
“I’m very unladylike now, because I have no estrogen,” Brown joked. “Lifetime — I don’t even watch that stuff anymore. Oprah — I think she’s a fraud. My wife knows I won’t go antique hunting with her anytime soon.”
Now Brown speaks out about his bout with male breast cancer.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Every man ought to pay attention. I think that’s probably why I was spared, so I could tell this. If you feel anything abnormal, you’ve got to get it checked out.”
Brown, who is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Tyler Holmes Memorial Hospital in Winona, has also been on WONA radio station promoting the hospital’s new mammography unit and telling men that they can get breast cancer, too, throughout Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Brown said “it could cost you your life” for men who feel something abnormal in their chest and do not go to the doctor.
“A man can just press against himself and feel it. If you feel anything or a little pinch, a lot of times it could be a little abscess or it could be a little knot,” he said. “If you do feel something, get it checked out.”
Brown said, “I think about my grandson. If I would have messed around and waited much longer, I may not have ever met my grandchild. That would have been horrible for him not to have known me.”
• Contact Ruthie Robison at 581-7233 or rrobison@gwcommonwealth.com.
• All people, whether male or female, are born with some breast cells and tissue. Even though males do not develop milk-producing breasts, a man’s breast cells and tissue can still develop cancer.
• Male breast cancer is very rare. Fewer than 1 percent of all breast cancer cases develop in men, and only one in a thousand men will ever be diagnosed with breast cancer.
• Male breast cancer can exhibit the same symptoms as breast cancer in women, including a lump.
• Anyone who notices anything unusual about their breasts, whether male or female, should contact their physician immediately.
• Survival rates and treatment for men with breast cancer are very similar to those for women. Early detection of breast cancer increases treatment options and often reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer.
