Breast cancer: A Marine’s biggest battle
By Ulrika G. Gerth
Thu Oct 15, 2009, 12:10 PM EDT

Newburyport -

Peter Devereaux, 47, never hesitated to ask the fellow Marine to see his scar. It was a scar not from the frontlines of battle, but from breast cancer. Twenty months had passed since the North Andover resident himself had received the devastating diagnosis, and there he was standing, for the first time, face to face with another male survivor.

They had just arrived at a hotel in Tampa, Fla., to film a recent segment for CNN about the strikingly high number of Marines who have been diagnosed with breast cancer after serving at Camp Lejeune, the U.S. Marine Corps’ training base in North Carolina. The following day, Devereaux and another five Marines took their shirts off while the camera rolled.

“It was kind of wild, weird, too,” he said. “We were checking each other out. We had all had mastectomies. What kind of scars did they have? What did they look like? It was an important moment. I’ve seen so many women with breast cancer, but you don’t ask a woman to take her shirt off.”

Male breast cancer is rare. Around 1,900 men are diagnosed every year; few compared to the nearly 200,000 women who each year begin their battle against the disease, but still too many to anyone like Devereaux, who until he picked up the phone one January day last year, had no idea men could even get breast cancer.

“My doctor called and said, ‘You’ve got an aggressive form of breast cancer,’” Devereux recalled, during an interview at a crowded Panera Bread in North Andover last week. “I thought he was looking at a woman’s report and said, ‘This is Peter Devereaux.’ My doctor understood what I was getting at and said, ‘Pete, guys get breast cancer, too.’”

Men at any age may develop breast cancer, but it is usually detected between 60 and 70 years of age, according to the American Cancer Institute. Since male breast cancer constitutes a mere 1 percent of all cases, men may not take seriously symptoms that would prompt a woman see her doctor immediately.

“I think that getting breast cancer is something that hardly crosses a man’s mind,” said Dr. Jeanne Yu, a surgeon and co-coordinator of the Mass General/North Shore Breast Center in Danvers. “Usually they don’t go in with a lump thinking they have breast cancer, which is not the case for women.”



Not a ‘man’s’ disease

On Friday morning, Jan. 11, 2008, Devereaux’s hands bumped into his chest as he got out of bed. He felt a squishy lump on either side of his left nipple, a “bite-size Snickers bar.” He saw his primary care doctor the next day, assuming it was the result of a basketball tackle or fatty food that a needle could easily break up. Test after test followed: ultrasounds, mammograms, a core biopsy.

The diagnosis was grim. Devereaux and his wife turned to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for a second opinion.

“First I had to get over the ego thing,” said Deveraux, who was too embarrassed to tell his buddies about the initial mammograms. “It’s bad enough to get cancer, then you get a woman’s disease. I was fortunate not to be a typical guy and got over that fact early on.”

About one in six cases of male breast cancer are hereditary, according to the Mayo Clinic Web site. Similar to women, it is especially defects in breast cancer gene 1 or 2 ‑ BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 ‑ that greatly increase the risk of developing the disease. And similar to women, risk factors include, for example, obesity, excessive drinking, family history, radiation exposure as a child and liver disease.

Devereaux tested negative for the breast cancer gene. He was young. He was fit. He was the type of guy who rarely caught a cold. But between 1980 and 1982, he served at Camp Lejeune. Tests of the drinking water, starting in the 1980s, revealed it contained 1,400 parts per million of three contaminants ‑ benzene, perchloroethylene, a dry cleaning solvent, and richloroethylene, a degreaser ‑ although the legal limit permitted no more than five parts.

As the story has played out on CNN and in major newspapers across the country, the number of former Marines, who were based at Camp Lejeune between the 1960s and 1980s and who now battle a disease so rare that Dr. Yu sees less than one male breast cancer patient a year, has grown to 49. The Marine Corps denies any responsibility.



Staying up for the fight

On Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, Devereaux underwent a mastectomy at Dana-Farber and had 21 lymph nodes removed. They were all cancerous. He was put in a 14-month clinical trial and endured 29 chemotherapy sessions and 30 radiations.

The treatment “beat the crap out of me.” He lost his hair, his fingernails and any sense of his hands. Three days before the final round on April 8 this year, he felt a searing pain in his shoulders and back. A body scan showed the cancer had spread to his spine, hips and ribs.

“There is no cure at all; the life average is two to three years,” he said. “The thing with metastatic breast cancer is that you have to do treatment forever; you just hope that forever is a long time.”

Most male breast cancer patients get mastectomies, unlike women, who often opt for a lumpectomy followed by radiation, Dr. Yu said. Men should be aware of their own bodies, she said, never letting a lump go unchecked.

“If there’s anything they’re worried about in their breasts, and they do have breasts, see your doctor,” Dr. Yu said. “That’s my take-home message.”

Devereaux has become an advocate for breast cancer awareness, trying at every opportunity to answer the question that he so many times wishes he could have asked another man when he, upon diagnosis, felt like a freak: “Hey, what’s it like?”

He advocates for more funding of metastatic breast cancer research, a field that he thinks major foundations neglect.

Refusing to “lie down and let cancer kick my butt,” he has sought alternative treatment at Revitalive Health & Wellness in Newburyport. He attends the bi-monthly sessions with his wife and 12-year-old daughter to rebuild his battered immune system.

“It takes months or years for a tumor to fester,” he said. “Men are not programmed to self exams. I was at Stage 3 when I was diagnosed. Now I’m at Stage 4. There is no Stage 5.”

He wore a short-sleeve collar shirt with a small logo for The Pink Angels, a team of breast cancer survivors who since 2005 have organized a three-day 60-mile walk through Boston. The shirt was pink, an unthinkable color choice for Devereaux only a few years ago.

To learn more about Peter Devereaux, visit peterdevereaux.com.

Ellie