Earlier this year, well-known local sportscaster Neil Macrae passed away after battling three separate cancers. The first of the three cancers is rarely associated with men — breast cancer.
Wife Laurie Rix-Macrae remembers the day he approached her about a lump that had been growing for months.
“He just said to me, sort of in an offhand way, ‘Oh, I’ve got this funny lump here. What do you think it is?'” she said.
WATCH: Longtime B.C broadcaster Neil Macrae dies
“I touched it. It was about the size of a golf ball but because he didn’t think anything of it and obviously it was growing, it was at that point where he thought, maybe I should mention it.”
“Men don’t even realize that they have breasts often, but men have some breast tissue and men can get breast cancer,” medical oncologist Karen Gelmon said. “It’s not common, only about one per cent of breast cancers are in men, but that still means there’ll be about 230 or so cases in Canada this year.”
Laurie said Macrae had to have a mastectomy.
“Because it had advanced, it was Stage 3, it had gone into his lymph nodes underneath his arm so he had to have follow-up treatment and chemo,” Rix-Macrae said.
The treatment worked but during that time doctors discovered Macrae had a mutated BRCA gene, which can put people at a higher risk of developing certain cancers.
“The BRCA2 gene is really recognized for putting men at higher risk of getting breast and prostate cancer, but as we get better at understanding these risks we might be able to identify more people earlier and hopefully prevent cancer,” Gelmon said.
Macrae battled two other forms of cancer before he passed away on March 30 in Palm Springs at the age of 65.
To help speed cancer research a fund has been started in his name.
“He’d be the first one to want other men to know that if you get a lump go see a doctor. You can successfully treat breast cancer,” Gelmon said.
— With files from Squire Barnes
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