Thursday 9 June 2005

Pic of the day: I had saved this picture for a much funnier use. (It is from the anime Ichigo 100%.) As you will soon see, this is a pretty dark humor today. "I don't need breasts like that" indeed.

This is just so wrong

There's a lump in my left breast. My doctor is setting up an appointment with a hospital surgeon.

I suspect that finding a lump in your breast is among the top ten fears of all grown women, and certainly any woman around my age. But I didn't even think about it. The reason is simple enough: I am a man.

It is true that I have had small breasts since puberty. That's a story in itself, but in short I began to develop in that direction first and then my masculine side took over, and has been doing so more and more ever since. It is not a big thing, and neither are my breasts, though they are certainly visible when I take off my clothes. As I did at the doctor's today, when I was there to have my heart checked after a scary episode one week ago. The doctor checked my heart, and I even took an EKG, which was fine as expected. I can continue to exercise as usual, I should just avoid long swims, which I don't do anyway. Also I should get to their office as soon as I can if I get such attacks again. But by and large it seems like there is no reason to worry. About that.

***

I don't know what possessed the doctor to start grabbing my breasts. Perhaps an angel. He didn't really give much of a reason, I suspect professional curiosity. I am not a nudist, but males are not as conscientious about covering their chests as women, and even that is not always a given here in Scandinavia. I probably have the largest breasts of any man I have seen, possibly excepting the grossly obese, and they tend to cover up pretty well anyway. It's not something that creeps people out – the hundreds of birthmark-like warts and the scattered fur do that – but it is certainly enough to rouse the scientist in a man. So he poked and prodded them carefully. And that's how he found the lump. It is indeed there and somewhat tender. I never considered self- examination of my breasts, and to be honest I would probably not have known whether it was natural or not. I don't know when it came there, but I believe it has been around for a while as I have felt some soreness there before.

The doctor seemed to think that I would be better off without breasts in the first case, but I don't really mind one way or another. It is probably a bit unsexy in a man, but I don't have sex anyway. It is certainly not my slightly enlarged milk glands that keeps me from it. In fact, if my breast buds are the only thing that keeps women from pulling at me begging me to sleep with them, I would rather continue like this. I may not have that option, though. Depending on what the surgeon may find, I may have to remove the left breast, in which case they will almost certainly take the right while I'm on the table anyway. It probably has very little effect on my chance of surviving the surgery... usually it is the anesthetics that kill you in surgery like that, not the blood loss.

Anyway, I have plenty of time to think about this, because it will take 3-6 months before I get to the surgeon. I sincerely hope women are treated faster, or there will be a lot of pointless deaths. Actually they are ... normally a woman is sent to mammography pretty quickly after a lump is discovered, but they couldn't take me. I am not surprised. While slightly more common than prostate problems in women, it is probably not something every hospital comes across every year. (Yes, I know women don't have a prostate. But it's the statistic they put beside breast cancer for comparison.)

Presumably there may be non-cancerous lumps in people's breasts, although I haven't heard of them. If however it is a primary breast tissue cancer, it is likely to grow quite slowly in the absence of female sex hormones. Well ... absence is too strong a word; men and women produce small amounts of each other's hormones. But since sometime in my teens, I have probably not had more of them than other males. Judging from the hair that grows over much of my body, and the way my fat deposits stay on my guts and avoid my thighs, I'm quite male. There are also more private details that confirm this theory. Just take my word for it. Or my doctor's, because the next thing he did was grope my gonads. I had tried to tell him that my breasts arrived early in puberty, but he just had to see and feel for himself that there were perfectly normal male gonads. They certainly were, and still are. I'll save the details for a more off-color entry, I think. For now, the story is that I'm fine except I have a lump in my left breast, and will presumably have so until fall at least.

***

It doesn't really feel really real. My brain knows it but my soul doesn't. I wonder if I will wake up one day and realize that it is true. I also wonder if I should keep some pounds of spare fat to see me through a possible chemotherapy. I understand that your stomach and gut lining falls off during those, so I should perhaps have some calories in reserve. But it seems so remote, so far away in every sense. As if it is happening to someone else. I guess it does, too.

You may write me with your horror stories now, because I really doubt I will seek out the established support groups.