Usually the doc wants to know about mom and grandma when they ask for any history of breast cancer in the family. But men can get breast cancer too - a statistic that's rare, but not rare enough for Arnaldo Silva. The 58-year-old New Yorker found a lump in late 2006. A few months later, his daughter got the news that she, too, had breast cancer.
Vanessa Silva and her dad went through masectomies together after a blood test showed he had the breast cancer "gene." That's when Vanessa went for her own tests, which came back positive. They went through chemotherapy together. In late 2007, Vanessa, 32, was finished with treatment and declared "in remission." Her father got similar news in early 2008.
Like most of the nearly 1,800 men diagnosed with breast cancer every year, Arnaldo didn't think he could get breast cancer - because he doesn't have breasts. "That's the way I took it, I have no breasts," he told ABC News. But as one popular 2005 book reminded us, men have nipples . . . and that means they have breasts too.
And as the ABC News doc points out, man boobs have nothing to do with it (although if you have them, we have one solution). "It doesn't matter how skinny you are. It doesn't matter how heavy you are," Dr. Sharon Rosenbaum Smith said. "All men have breast tissue and can develop a breast cancer."
So Dads, it's time to join your partners in feeling yourself up once a month. Do it for your daughters. And your sons.
Image: ABC News
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