Page 62 of While I’m Still Here

“They were donated.”

“Give them back.”

“They're flowers, Bea.”

“They know what they've done.”

Janet laughs, and Bea reluctantly steps farther into the room, shrugging out of her coat. I look down at my coffee before she catches me watching her, though I suspect I'm already too late. Bea seems to notice everything. Not necessarily correctly, given that our first conversation began with her assuming I was somebody's husband, but she notices. I don't particularly like this group.

That's not something I've ever admitted aloud because it feels ungrateful. The people here are good people. The nurses are excellent, Janet can befriend almost anyone within twelve minutes, and I've watched newly diagnosed women walk through that door shaking and leave an hour later looking slightly less frightened. I understand the value of the place. I simply don't enjoy being in it or discussing cancer, and I certainly don't enjoy discussing my feelings about cancer while sitting in a circle beneath a noticeboard decorated with pink ribbons.

I still come almost every week.

That wasn't always the case.

When I was diagnosed at thirty-six, I had never knowingly met a man with breast cancer. More importantly, I didn't know that I could be one. I'd heard of breast cancer, obviously. Everyone has. I'd seen the campaigns and charity runs, noticed the pink ribbons appearing every October, known women who'd been called for mammograms and watched adverts reminding women to check their breasts. I had absorbed the message for most of my adult life without ever understanding that any part of it applied to me.

So when I found the lump beneath my left nipple, breast cancer didn't occur to me.

Not once.

I remember standing in the bathroom after a shower and running my fingers over it several times, trying to work out whether it had always been there. It was small, hard and painless. I was thirty-six, healthy, exercising regularly and, crucially, male. I decided it was probably a cyst. Perhaps I'd irritated something at the gym. Perhaps men's bodies occasionally developed harmless lumps, and nobody talked about it because there was nothing interesting to say.

I left it alone, but then I checked it again the following week… and the week after that.

Four months passed before I finally made an appointment with my GP, and even then I went expecting to be told I had wasted everyone's time. I remember apologising before the examination had even started. I remember saying, “It's probably nothing,” because apparently I felt responsible for reassuring the doctor about the lump in my own chest.

After that, everything accelerated. A referral became imaging, imaging became a biopsy, and eventually I found myself sitting opposite a consultant who used the words breast cancer.

The cancer part frightened me.

The breast part confused me.

I looked down at my own chest while he spoke, as though I might discover something anatomically surprising there. I knew men had nipples. I knew men had tissue beneath them. I had simply never joined those facts together and arrived at the possibility that the same tissue could become cancerous.

The first person I told asked whether I was joking. The second said, “I didn't know men could get that.” By the fifth or sixth time, I had an answer prepared.

Neither did I.

It became easier to say than explaining that I'd spent four months carrying a lump around because breast cancer had been so firmly coded as a woman's disease in my mind that even finding something abnormal in my own chest hadn't made me consider it. Treatment wasn't particularly interested in my assumptions. I had a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, followed by hormone therapy. I lost my hair, a breast I had never thought to call a breast until somebody told me it was trying to kill me, and most of the sensation across the left side of my chest. I also lost a considerable amount of patience with people who told me everything happened for a reason.

What surprised me almost as much as the diagnosis itself was how invisible I felt afterwards.

It wasn't anybody's fault. Breast cancer overwhelmingly affects women, so naturally the support surrounding it is built predominantly for women. I understood that intellectually. Understanding it didn't make it any less strange to sit in a breast clinic as the only male patient while every poster showed a woman. It didn't make the leaflets about bras and femininity more relevant to me, or give me somewhere to put the questions I had about walking into a changing room with a mastectomy scar across a male chest. I was surrounded by information about the disease I had, yet somehow kept feeling as though none of it had been written with me in mind.

A nurse suggested this group during treatment, and I attended once. I hated it and didn’t come back for months. The second time I tried, another man happened to walk through the same doors as I did. Peter was sixty-three and newly diagnosed, and the relief on his face when he realised I had breast cancer too was something I’ve never forgotten. He sat beside me during the break, asking questions for almost the entire time and then more on the way out. Some were about treatment, but most were about things nobody had put in the leaflets—if people would laugh when he told them, or if his scar would make him feel less masculine, or even if it was normal to feel embarrassed telling people what kind of cancer he had.

He wasn’t asking if those things were normal. He was asking whether he was alone.

After that, I kept coming. Peter finished treatment and eventually stopped attending. I didn’t.

Not because I’ve discovered an unexpected passion for support groups. I still hate the coffee, and definitely still think there are more than enough pink ribbons in this room to decorate a small country. I come because around four hundred men in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, and eventually one of them might walk through those doors again. If he does, I don’t want him to look around, see eleven women and immediately wonder if he’s entered a space that isn’t meant for him.

I want there to be one man in the room. So I make terrible coffee every Thursday, and I sit by the window. Tonight, however, I am considerably more interested in the woman sitting three chairs away from me.

Bea is angry again, and I’ve found that I quite like that about her.

Perhaps like is the wrong word. I’m merely fascinated by this 5’2 woman who just seems to hate the world for making her exist in it. There’s a weird pressure around cancer to become inspirational almost immediately after diagnosis, as though some malignant cells are somehow capable of transforming an ordinary person into a motivational speaker. People tell you you’re brave before you’ve done anything except show up for appointments because the alternative is dying.