October 3: Too Young or Too Male?

This post doesn't explictly focus on metastatic disease, but instead highlights a disturbing reality of breast cancer. It's not just for women after menopause anymore.

With an increasing frequency, young women are being diagnosed with breast cancer. And in younger women, it's usually more aggressive, more likely to become advanced.

Girls who should be focused on prom and graduation from high school are getting diagnosed. Even tweens are getting diagnosed. While young women with breast cancer are still the minority compared to the older end of the spectrum, they exist. And it can occur at a shockingly young age.

Mammograms start at age 40 because they're not effective for screening for breast cancer in younger women. The breast tissue is too dense for a clear reading. By the time breast cancer is detected in young women (a lump for ductal carcinoma, a thickening of the tissue and/or lumps for lobular carcinoma, red irritated inflammation of the skin for inflammatory breast cancer) it is usually advanced. Lymph nodes swell and tests are run, and by that time it's already beginning to circulate through the body, increasing the risk of metastasis.

In my own case, I'd had cysts before which opened and drained on their own. When I felt the lump, it was painful and itchy at the time, and in the beginning, I couldn't always find it. It seemed to come and go around my menstrual cycle, and as I said, it hurt and itched. There were no other warning signs in the breast, no dimpling or changes besides the lump, and symptom-wise, it pointed to a cyst. I was under 40, and there was little concern even from medical professionals that it was anything more than a cyst. It was only when I finally went in to have it drained that a biopsy ended up being ordered and confirmed it was actually breast cancer. By that point, it was advanced and had spread to my liver.

If you have breast tissue, you can get breast cancer regardless of your age, or even your gender. Men are getting diagnosed with breast cancer too, and because it's so often promoted as a female disease, they don't realize it, and by the time they're diagnosed, they're often already at Stage III or IV.

The worst part is, because breast cancer is so often viewed as a woman's disease, men with breast cancer can face ridicule and mockery, shaming them into silence. Even if they suspect they have breast cancer, this shame can prevent them from seeking medical help until it's far too late. And there are not enough men who have been diagnosed in order for there to be a proper protocol for treating men.

Anyone remember the Secret antiperspirant commercials and their slogan? "Strong enough for a man, pH balanced for a woman"?  Men and women are different on so many levels, and the treatments for breast cancer that are effective on females don't always work as well on men. There is so little known that they lack decent treatment options.

The pink ribbon has done a great deal for spreading awareness, but unfortunately it has done so at the expense of far too many.

Men.

Children.

Metastatic disease.

The pink ribbon doesn't cover those, doesn't acknowledge it. We might make up a rarer percentage, but we are still a percentage that exists, and that needs to be known.