MARYSVILLE — Like most men, Mike Ferri had never even considered that he could be diagnosed with breast cancer.
That changed after he went to a doctor in December 2013, when his wife noticed that he’d been bleeding slightly from his right nipple.
His doctor referred him to a surgeon, who scheduled an appointment in May 2014 to remove what he suspected was a burst blood vessel.
As it turned out, the surgeon found a three-inch mass of soft white tissue, and when it was biopsied, Ferri received the call telling him he had breast cancer.
“I think he was shocked to tell me,” said Ferri, who was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer and given a mastectomy date later that summer.
The removal of his infected lymph nodes gave Ferri a case of lymphedema, which caused his right arm to swell from fluid retention.
And then, his oncologist gave him the odds.
“My options were to do nothing, which left me with a one-in-10 chance of the cancer recurring, or get chemo, which would drop those odds, or get radiation, which would drop them even further,” Ferri said. “I was like, let’s just get this over with.”
Ferri opted for both chemo and radiation, and received the breast cancer gene test in the process. Although the test is expensive, his insurance covered it. As a plus, he found out that he didn’t carry the breast cancer gene.
“There’s very little data on men getting breast cancer,” Ferri said. “I still have to get a mammogram for my left breast every six months.”
Ferri’s chemo treatments started in October of last year. He only had to undergo four treatments, one every three weeks, but he had a bad reaction to the drugs before he was done.
“My fourth treatment was on my birthday, so that was a nice present,” said Ferri, who finished chemo that December. “Everyone told me the chemo would be hard, but for me, radiation was harder.”
Indeed, when Ferri started his radiation treatments in February, he was told he’d have to undergo 33 treatments, every day consecutively, except for on weekends. His last week of treatment was supposed to be in mid-March, but he had a bad reaction to the radiation that week, which required him to undergo four more weeks of treatment, every day including weekends.
“Even Easter Sunday,” Ferri said. “I had a hole in my chest, with a lot of fluid coming out of it. I developed a fever and a staph infection, and my skin was burned.”
Ferri had already lost most of his hair by his third chemo treatment, but it’s since grown back, even thicker than before. By contrast, he’ll be on estrogen-blocking pills for the rest of his life, and he still needs help changing the dressing on his chest every day.
“They told me that radiated tissue heals more slowly,” Ferri said. “They gave me the possibility of reconstructive surgery, which I don’t want to do, but when I saw wound care specialists, they also suggested the possibility of using a hyperbaric chamber to help it heal.”
Although Ferri opted for the most-aggressive course of cancer treatment after being diagnosed, since he was told that chemo wouldn’t work if he waited for the cancer to recur, he believes he should have been more concerned when his wife first spotted the bleeding.
“But in my wildest imaginings, I wouldn’t have thought it could be breast cancer,” Ferri said. “When I went to the oncologist, I was told they would literally treat me like a woman, simply because they don’t know enough about how breast cancer is different for men.”
That being said, Ferri acknowledged that mammograms aren’t always foolproof, since his mass escaped detection at first.
“The recuperation is different than it is for a woman,” Ferri said. “On the one hand, I don’t have to worry about reconstructive surgery for my breast. On the other, because it’s so rare for men, I can’t just call up another guy who’s had breast cancer and ask, ‘So, how did it go for you?’ ”
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