In August 2012, Peter Botros, of New York City, noticed bloody discharge secreting out of his left nipple.
He couldn’t be sure why it was happening – but breast cancer was hardly his first guess.
Botros’s mother had had breast cancer, and passed away from it when he was a teenager, but he didn’t believe it was possible for men to get the disease.
He was shocked when, a few weeks later, he was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer, reported CBS Philly.
The 33-year-old had a double mastectomy and is now cancer-free, but says he believes that not enough men know that they are at risk.
The issue was forced into the spotlight last week when Beyoncé’s father, Matthew Knowles, revealed his breast cancer diagnosis.
And, earlier this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calling for more men to be included in clinical trials for breast cancer drugs so that the disease can be better understood.
Botros echoes the agency’s concerns, in the hopes of erasing stigma and improving survival rates for the disease that’s often caught too late when it strikes men.
Peter Botros, then 26 (pictured), of New York City, noticed bloody discharge coming out of his left nipple in 2012
In August, he was diagnosed with Stage I ductal carcinoma in situ, a form of breast cancer. His own mother died of breast cancer when he was 14 years old. Pictured: Botros (center) during his middle school graduation with his father (left) and mother (right)
Botros told CBS Philly that his mother had battled breast cancer as long as he could remember before passing away when he was age 14.
‘She had cancer pretty much my whole life,’ he said. ‘On and off, she had beat it and it came back. Beat it and it came back.’
Botros never believed he was at risk.
He said he wasn’t even the first person to notice the discharge coming out of his breast, but rather his girlfriend at the time.
‘[She] was doing some laundry…and noticed a little blood on my T-shirt where my breast would be,’ Botros wrote in a blog post for The Male Breast Cancer Coalition.
‘I was in the shower at the time, so when she came to tell me what she found, I checked my breast. I didn’t see anything but, when I was drying off, I pushed on my chest and a little blood came out.’
Botros’s girlfriend wanted him to go to the ER, but he compromised and called a family friend who was a pediatrician.
She suggested he get a mammogram. The test showed nothing but the doctor who saw him ordered a biopsy, he wrote in the blog post.
In August 2012, he was diagnosed with Stage I ductal carcinoma in situ, which is a cancer found only in the milk ducts.
‘I thought it had to be a mistake,’ Botros told CBS Philly, referring to when learned the news. ‘[I was] trying to put the pieces together to see how it was possible that a 26-year–old man could have breast cancer.’
One out of every eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during her lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society.
Breast cancer occurs in men too, but the incidence rate is less than one percent.
It is estimated that more than 2,600 men will be diagnosed with the disease in 2019, and about 500 men will die.
Botros, 33 (left and right), underwent a double mastectomy and is currently cancer-free. He says he wants to break the stigma that surrounds male breast cancer, the incidence rate of which is less than one percent
Earlier this year, the FDA called for more men to be included in clinical trials for breast cancer drugs. Pictured: A scan of Botros’s breast
Recently, Beyoncé’s father, Matthew Knowles, revealed he was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in July after experiencing the same bloody discharge Botros did.
Breast cancer cases in men are often more advanced by the time they are diagnosed because they don’t know they can get the disease.
And when they are diagnosed, often when the men are at an older age, doctors tend to treat them similarly to women.
That’s why, in August, the FDA issued a recommendation encouraging male patients to be included in breast cancer clinical trials.
Botros underwent a double mastectomy, which is a surgical procedure that removes both breast, and is currently cancer-free.
He told CBS Philly that he hopes sharing his story will help remove some of the stigma that surrounds male breast cancer and to encourage other men to get tested if they feel something is wrong with one of their breasts.
