Two Connecticut residents Bob DeVito, left, and Bill Becker, bear their scars from breast cancer in a documentary directed by a New Canaan resident. (David Jay, The Scar Project photo)
Breast cancer isn’t exclusive to women. Men get it too.
But because the disease is more common in women than it is in men — in 2013 232,340 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed among women compared to 2,240 in men, according to an estimate by the American Cancer Society — it is often overlooked in men until it has developed to a later stage.
One New Canaan resident, Nick Sadler, is filming a documentary to raise awareness of the number of men who are diagnosed with breast cancer. Sadler, an actor and filmmaker, who has worked on various films and HBO documentaries, became interested in doing a documentary on breast cancer after his son’s friend’s grandmother passed away from the disease a year and a half ago.
New Canaan resident Nick Sadler is directing and producing a documentary, ‘Times Like These,’ which focuses on breast cancer in males.
Sadler began doing volunteer work filming video clips of survivors telling their stories for the Connecticut Chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. While conducting research, he found out that men, too, are diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I was shocked that most men don’t know and that their doctors don’t check for it either,” Sadler said. “The recurring theme with men is that it’s not part of their general health awareness. Just like women have to be checked, men should have a preliminary checkup, which would go a long way toward helping this.”
Soon after he began work with the Komen Foundation, Sadler met two men in Connecticut — Bill Becker, who lives in Bridgeport, and Bob DeVito, a Waterbury native — who have become the faces of the documentary. The two were diagnosed with stage 3A breast cancer within a year of one another.
Becker, who was diagnosed a year before DeVito, is a husband, father of six, and was 43 when he found out. DeVito was diagnosed at age 49 and found out while he was out shopping with his partner one day.
Both Becker and DeVito sought support from the women at the Susan G. Komen Connecticut Chapter because there were no male-centered groups out there. In addition, there was very little information about breast cancer in men they could readily find. When the two finally learned of one another and met, they became instant friends.
“We are telling a very personal story of what happens to the men and their families that go through this,” Sadler said. “There is a stigma attached to it. Some guys I ran into were too embarrassed to talk about it. There’s not the support there and the general education. Sickness is sickness, and there should never be any stigma about any kind of illness whatsoever.”
‘Breast cancer brothers’
Back in May 2011, Becker found a lump on his chest that had taken on an odd shape. He ignored it for a few months, then he eventually spoke with his wife and then to his primary care physician, who said the lump looked suspicious. A mammogram and ultrasound of the area dictated that Becker had breast cancer.
“I immediately kind of went into a state of shock on so many levels,” he explained. “My life was starting to flash before my eyes, and not knowing enough about what a woman would go through, I thought about what I was going to go through being a guy. I wondered, ‘Is there a stigma to this?’”
“All this really plagued me and kept me quiet at first,” Becker continued. “I guess you could say I was embarrassed, and on top of being nervous, I have a family to support.”
Becker ended up having a full mastectomy and went through five to six months of chemotherapy, which was followed by four to five weeks of radiation. This past February, after Becker went to the doctor for pain in his hip, a bone scan unveiled spots on his spine and hip. He was diagnosed with stage four, terminal cancer.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that guys have their primary care physicians do chest exams on them,” he said. “Go, and if you see something that’s different, have it checked out. It might be nothing, but if it turns out to be something, you want to get it early.”
Becker met DeVito after DeVito was diagnosed in May 2012. DeVito also reached out to the women at Susan G. Komen and ended up getting in touch with Becker.
“Before you knew it, he and I were laughing and joking and the best of friends,” Becker said.
Stadler told the Advertiser that since Becker and DeVito met and became friends, they began calling themselves “breast cancer brothers.”
DeVito first noticed a small, pea-sized lump above his left nipple around 2009. He mentioned it to his doctor, who told him it was most likely a cyst. Soon after, DeVito lost his job and his insurance lapsed for a bit, so he didn’t follow-up too closely with doctor visits. When he got a new job in March 2012, he made an appointment for a well visit with his doctor. While he was getting checked out, he remembered the lump and noticed it was larger and had changed shape. A week earlier, he added, a lymph node under his arm swelled to the size of a ping pong ball.
His doctor checked out the lump and looked concerned. DeVito heard his doctor mumble something about nipple inversion to one of the nurses, and then he was sent to have a mammogram and ultrasound. DeVito said he could tell the ultrasound technician didn’t like what she was seeing. Then a doctor came in.
“She got a serious look on her face, and I got a terrified look on my face,” he said.
Devito received a call back from the doctor instructing him to see a surgeon. He had a biopsy done and on May 11, 2012, he got a phone call informing him he had breast cancer.
DeVito with was his partner at the time he received the call.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I started to cry, and my partner started to cry because he knew I was getting bad news. As [the doctor] was telling me all this about the mastectomy and removing my nipple, his voice started to fade into the Charlie Brown teacher voice, and all I could think was ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to be disfigured, and I’m going to have to tell everyone I know I have male breast cancer.’”
DeVito had undergone a mastectomy and essentially the same treatment as Becker. He invited Sadler to his mammogram and ultrasound appointments so Sadler could collect footage for the documentary.
Right now, DeVito is negative for any sign of cancer.
Awareness and support
After DeVito was diagnosed, he went to the Susan G. Komen site for information on male breast cancer and found nothing. He ended up joining a support group of women called Brave at Heart at the Harold Leever Cancer Center in Waterbury.
“They’ve adopted me,” DeVito said of the group. “They call themselves the ‘Pink Sisters.’ When anyone is new there I have to explain my presence. They’ve been great. I couldn’t have gotten through it without them.”
Becker and DeVito are working on forming a foundation called the Breast Cancer Brothers in order to raise awareness of the disease and how it affects men. They also participated in the Scar Project, in which New York photographer David Jay, shot pictures of women bearing their mastectomy scars and also focused on seven men ready to bear their scars. Sadler also shot video from that photo shoot for his documentary.
Most people are aware that October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but in Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy has declared the week of Oct. 20 to 26, male breast cancer awareness week.
According to the American Cancer Society, about 2,240 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in men in 2013, and about 410 of them will die from breast cancer. Typically men in their 60s and 70s are diagnosed with breast cancer.
There are some things a man can do to lower his risk of breast cancer: maintaining an ideal body weight and restricting alcohol consumption are two of them, according to the ACS. But since the cause of most breast cancers is not known, there is no known way to prevent them.
“For now, the best strategies for reducing the number of deaths caused by this disease are early detection and prompt treatment,” according to the ACS site. “Early detection has been a problem for men, who tend to ignore breast lumps and see their doctor only when the lumps have gotten large. In general, men are diagnosed with cancers at more advanced stages than are women.”
The point of Sadler’s documentary is to raise awareness and to make the information available to cancer research and support groups. He hopes to wrap up the film next year and submit it to film festivals after that.