HOOVERSVILLE —
Donald C. Shaffer knew there was something wrong.
The changes he was noticing around his nipple were becoming more painful.
His family doctor had examined the hard lumps a few weeks earlier, but the pain was not going away.
That was in the spring of 2010.
“I told my wife, ‘I have to go back,’ ” the 77-year-old Shaffer recalled, sitting next to his wife, Betty, in the kitchen of their home on Barn Street in Hooversville.
“My doctor made the appointment with Dr. Dianna Craig at the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center. They ran tests.”
The usual battery of tests for a suspected lump in the breast began on the mammogram machine, Betty Shaffer said.
“I went that week for a mammogram and he had one, too,” she said. “Dr. Craig’s whole staff has been wonderful.”
Additional studies led to a biopsy procedure later that summer. When the results came back, Craig called the retired Bethlehem Steel bar mill worker and his wife into her office.
“She hit us with the news,” Donald Shaffer said.
“Nobody could have been more shocked than we were when she said what it was,” Betty Shaffer said.
Donald Shaffer is one of about 2,100 men in the United States who were diagnosed with breast cancer last year.
In September 2010, Craig removed three tumors and the surrounding tissue in the male version of a radical mastectomy. Nineteen lymph nodes also were removed to help prevent the cancer’s spread.
The surgery was followed by a grueling regimen of 16 chemotherapy treatments and 35 radiation treatments that continued into July.
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Disease not just for women
Facts about male breast cancer:
• Women are 100 times more likely to get breast cancer.
• 2,140 men will be diagnosed this year.
• 450 will die from breast cancer this year.
Symptoms
• A lump in the chest area.
• Skin dimpling or puckering.
• Nipple changes.
• Dimpling, puckering or redness of the skin of the breast.
• Itchy, scaly sore or rash on the nipple.
• Pulling in of the nipple or other parts of the breast.
• Nipple discharge.
• Inverted nipple.
Source: Susan G. Komen for the Cure
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