Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 19, 1993 TAG: 9310190159
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
After just a few minutes, the doctor emerges and leads Rice to a small office. "It's a malignancy," the doctor says quietly. "She'll need a mastectomy."
With those words, Rice's life is forever changed. In the coming months, he'll nurse Diane through surgery and chemotherapy, and take over the primary care of their four children - all while maintaining a full-time teaching load at the University of South Carolina.
It will be almost a year before he can even begin to express the horror of that moment in the hospital. "When something like this hits, you're conditioned to withstand it and carry on," Rice says. "You don't think you have any other choice."
Increasingly, however, there is another choice: talking about it. As the incidence of breast cancer rises and the understanding of male emotions deepens, a growing number of hospitals are creating support groups for men whose partners have breast cancer.
By talking about their sadness, anger and fear, these men can learn to cope with their own powerful emotions while at the same time discovering how best to support their loved one through her illness.
"Men have been left out, and it's not healthy for them or for women," says the Rev. Jack Hambrick, who last year helped launch Man to Man, a breast-cancer support group at Baptist Medical Center in Columbia, S.C. "By simply gathering together in the same room, these men gain perspective and support."
Hambrick, 60, knows how desperately that's needed.
In 1968, his wife, Jeanette, was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, he knew almost nothing about the disease. When a doctor mentioned a mastectomy, he didn't even know what that meant.
Fortunately, he had good instincts. He accompanied her to doctor appointments, listened to her fears, expressed his own, and reinitiated their sex life when she had physically recovered from cancer therapy.
"I didn't marry your breast. I didn't marry your body," he told her when she questioned herself. "I married you, and whatever we do, we do it together."
The cancer went into remission for 10 years, answering Jeanette's prayer that she be able to finish raising her son. But when the cancer finally returned, it could not be stopped. In 1980, two months after attending her son's wedding, Jeanette Hambrick died.
Today, 13 years later, the experience still lives with Jack Hambrick. He's been happily remarried since 1984, he says, but he occasionally has conflicting feelings. "By loving someone else, it's like I'm denying her [Jeanette's] existence a little," he says.
And he fears for the health of his second wife. When she mentions even a minor health concern, anxiety often sweeps through him. Hambrick shares these and other concerns each month at Man to Man, where as many as a dozen men show up to listen and tell of their own struggles.
Tom Rice, the university professor, says he was skeptical about the group at first. "I'm not into touchy-feely stuff," he says. But, to his surprise, he finds the gatherings reassuring and educational.
Still, Rice is not one to openly express his emotions - at a support group or anywhere else. That's why he is so surprised at what happened recently after his wife discovered a lump in her other breast.
Back at the doctor's office for another biopsy, Rice waited alone again. Afterward, as he held hands with Diane in the recovery room, the doctor entered. "Everything's fine," he said this time.
Suddenly, the dam burst. After a year of stoicism, Rice wept openly. "I just lost it," he says. "The tears, the release of tension. It was a situation where I didn't need to be strong. I guess it was finally OK for me to let go." For information on breast-cancer support groups for men, contact the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, 1180 Avenue of the Americas, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10036.)
MEN-TION
How Men Can Help
1 Show up for every doctor appointment you can
2 Listen to her expressions of emotion.
3 Express your own emotions honestly.
4 Talk openly about sexuality and other issues.
5 Be honest and positive with children.
\ MALE CALL
Men: If you have ever gone through breast cancer with a loved one, what was it like? Women: What did the man in your life do that helped you through a crisis with breast cancer?
(Send responses, questions and comments to "The Men's Column," in care of the Features Department, Roanoke Times & World-News, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010-2491. Universal Press Syndicate
by CNB