It was five days before his 50th birthday when Rick Martin-Bacon received the bad news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This bad news was, perhaps, more difficult to accept than when Rick had faced life-or-death situations during his military service. He had also survived an accident during a demonstration on a medieval battlefield that had seen him hit in the eye by a crossbow. But this news was even more unusual than the crossbow incident (more on that later) and is something that, even today, many men are unaware that it is even possible. He was told that he had breast cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI was sitting at home one day and, of course, being a typical work from home type, I had Facebook in the corner of the screen and somebody happened to put up the symptoms of breast cancer and I sat there and thought \u2018hold on, I\u2019ve had two of those symptoms\u2019 and I had,\u201d explained Rick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019d noticed that I\u2019d been in a tournament (I teach medieval martial arts) and on the inside of my gambeson, which is the padded jacket that we wear, I noticed that there was a little stain just where my right nipple would be, and I thought nothing of it. It was only a little stain and I tried to think if I\u2019d been hit there and I thought I might have as the adrenaline goes when you\u2019re in a fight and so I ignored it until I noticed it again on my shirt and then on my bed and I thought \u201cI might have to go and get this checked\u201d. Then it stopped and so I thought it was fine and not a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI completely ignored the fact that I\u2019d just had the first symptom of breast cancer until I started noticing a lump around the seven o\u2019clock position on my right nipple and it started getting bigger and bigger and I again thought \u201cI may have to get this checked\u201d and it wasn\u2019t until I received that information on Facebook about the six primary symptoms of breast cancer that I noticed I actually had a third and went \u2018right I have to get it checked\u2019 and did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many men may have dismissed those symptoms, even when encountered with information via social media, as was the case with Rick. There is still a lack of awareness amongst men of the possibility of becoming one of the 350 men diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK alone. The perceived \u201cgender exclusivity\u201d of breast cancer can lead to delays in seeking a diagnosis and then treatment and, like with all cancers, it could prove fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rick said: \u201cI was lucky that eight years ago I was sat in the doctor\u2019s surgery and they had a documentary on, one of those morning documentaries. I was there watching this documentary and this guy was being trundled into surgery having a mastectomy for male breast cancer and it was even on the same side of his body that I would later have mine! I sat there and thought \u2018I didn\u2019t know men could get that\u2019. It was then filed in the back of the mind. Eight years later, I\u2019m suddenly confronted with the symptoms and I hadn\u2019t been allowed to get away from. I could ignore two separate symptoms but not when they\u2019re in the same group (displayed in the information on Facebook). Then there was the knowledge that led to me getting checked out, getting treatment and then possibly survive, and if I don\u2019t survive now then it\u2019s not because I haven\u2019t tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut one of the problems is that a lot of blokes don\u2019t know it\u2019s possible and, even if they do, they switch off and there\u2019s this weird kind of machismo there. It\u2019s almost like \u2018I can\u2019t get it because it\u2019s a woman\u2019s disease\u2019. It isn\u2019t. If you have tissue there, you can get the disease.\u201d Determining a diagnosis for breast cancer in men can present its own difficulties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rick is an archaeologist from Staffordshire. A biopsy followed, before on October 20th last year, Rick was told he had breast cancer\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey actually brought me this pile of information from Breast Cancer Care and Macmillan which was all in bite sized chunks. When I was in the army we had an aide memoire which allows you to deal with things sequentially when you\u2019re under stress. If you\u2019re a platoon commander and you\u2019re about to go into a platoon attack, you\u2019ve got to know how to do it and so you have an aide memoire so you can say \u2018have I done this\u2019 or \u2018have I done that\u2019. And this (from Breast Cancer Care) gave me everything I needed to deal with not just with the physical side of things but also information on how things are actually graded. This then has a direct effect on your emotional and psychological fight against it and it went right the way through to the position I\u2019m in now. They give you little things such as telling you \u2018you\u2019re going to have a wobble\u2019 because everyone has a wobble; you\u2019ve just had cancer. It\u2019s a case that you may turn around and say that you\u2019ve got over it but you\u2019re not always going to get over it in the way that everybody else thinks, and you\u2019ve got a support group around you and that\u2019s another good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Treatment was swift in Rick\u2019s case. He underwent a mastectomy on November 6th at University Hospital of North Staffordshire and left there the same day. The ongoing treatment means he will take Tamoxifen for the next five years. The drug can have adverse side effects for men but Rick adds \u201cwhen I\u2019ve got people with over a century\u2019s worth of experience telling me to take it, I\u2019m going to take it\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the launch of Print Pink, a Cartridge People campaign aimed at raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Care, Rick is full of praise for how the charity has helped him through this difficult time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m lucky, I appear to have missed or dodged the bullet but ultimately it\u2019s a case of me being in a much worse position if it wasn\u2019t for Breast Cancer Care and this is the good thing about people like Cartridge People supporting Breast Cancer Care. It\u2019s not just individual people who directly get it, it\u2019s the families. A lot of the girls that I\u2019m in the fashion show with (in a couple of weeks for Breast Cancer Care) are mothers. Their children have to deal with breast cancer, their husbands have to deal with breast cancer, their parents have to deal with breast cancer; uncles, aunties, nephews and nieces all have to deal with breast cancer. Twelve thousand people, or 12,400 if you include men, are getting diagnosed with breast cancer annually and it\u2019s a huge killer of people, principally women. If you take the mother out of a family, you\u2019re removing the focal point. So it\u2019s not just people like me that suffer from it, it\u2019s other people who suffer. I call myself a \u2018breast cancer opponent\u2019 but it\u2019s a case of so many people suffer,\u201d commented Rick who sadly saw the tragic consequences of breast cancer when he lost his mother-in-law to the illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI saw the devastation of that (breast cancer) on my wife, my sister-in-law, nieces and brother-in-law and then I had to actually undergo it myself obviously thinking \u2018I\u2019m going to die\u2019 which wasn\u2019t the first time I\u2019d been placed in that position but this was the first time I\u2019d not been able to do anything about it! What Breast Cancer Care did was they managed to get me out of that funk. They managed to show me that there was a future and that it wasn\u2019t a case of I was automatically going to die. Even if I was going to die, I didn\u2019t have to die in an undignified way. I would have lots of opportunities to choose how I did it. And that\u2019s the thing about Breast Cancer Care, they\u2019ll support you right through that process even if you are (diagnosed to be terminally ill) and we couldn\u2019t do it without people like you (Cartridge People) and that is highly important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next for Rick is a fashion show at the Grosvenor House hotel in London, an event that raised \u00a3350,000 last year. A far cry from the medieval martial arts demonstrations he does and where he was involved in an accident that could have been fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Describing what happened, Rick said: \u201cI was shot in the eye with a crossbow, curiously enough doing archaeology again. It was experimental stuff. I happened to be demonstrating time-to-target casualty ratio on a medieval battlefield to Worcester archaeology. I was head to foot in medieval armour and a friend of mine happened to shoot me in the eye, which was something I really wasn\u2019t expecting! Three years later, we actually ended up employing him in the company that my wife runs because he wasn\u2019t a bad archaeologist he was just a lousy shot!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The recovery from that injury was long although the mental strength needed to get through it maybe helped Rick when he was going through his breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. But the help of Breast Cancer Care also played a big part. It is one of the reasons Cartridge People are proud of a Print Pink campaign that will look to raise thousands of pounds for the charity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI had a low stage, low grade cancer. It was 16ml (the lump), nothing major. They mastectomized me and I\u2019m now on Tamoxifen. I was suddenly thrown into the midst of a bunch of people including the models I\u2019ll be joining in a couple of weeks at a fashion show. Suddenly, I\u2019m encountering people who have had it a lot worse than me. I\u2019ve had a really easy journey compared to some of these girls. We\u2019re talking about girls in their twenties who\u2019ve had double mastectomies and who have had to have chemotherapy and radiotherapy and in my position I\u2019ve not had to worry about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBreast Cancer Care release a lot of resources to the NHS for medical work and what you\u2019re doing (with the Print Pink campaign) is you\u2019re supporting people who are vulnerable and who are, not so much needy, but there are people out there who really need this help and on their behalf, thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n