Rick Martin-Bacon: Natural Born Survivor

It was five days before his 50th birthday when Rick Martin-Bacon received the bad news.

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.

“I 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 ‘hold on, I’ve had two of those symptoms’ and I had,” explained Rick.

“I’d noticed that I’d 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’d been hit there and I thought I might have as the adrenaline goes when you’re in a fight and so I ignored it until I noticed it again on my shirt and then on my bed and I thought “I might have to go and get this checked”. Then it stopped and so I thought it was fine and not a problem.

“I completely ignored the fact that I’d just had the first symptom of breast cancer until I started noticing a lump around the seven o’clock position on my right nipple and it started getting bigger and bigger and I again thought “I may have to get this checked” and it wasn’t 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 ‘right I have to get it checked’ and did.”

Raising awareness of breast cancer in men

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 “gender exclusivity” of breast cancer can lead to delays in seeking a diagnosis and then treatment and, like with all cancers, it could prove fatal.

Rick said: “I was lucky that eight years ago I was sat in the doctor’s 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 ‘I didn’t know men could get that’. It was then filed in the back of the mind. Eight years later, I’m suddenly confronted with the symptoms and I hadn’t been allowed to get away from. I could ignore two separate symptoms but not when they’re 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’t survive now then it’s not because I haven’t tried.

“But one of the problems is that a lot of blokes don’t know it’s possible and, even if they do, they switch off and there’s this weird kind of machismo there. It’s almost like ‘I can’t get it because it’s a woman’s disease’. It isn’t. If you have tissue there, you can get the disease.”

Determining a diagnosis for breast cancer in men can present its own difficulties. Rick, an archaeologist from Staffordshire, spoke of how trying to get in the right position for a mammogram left him “looking like a swastika”. A biopsy then followed before, on October 20th last year, Rick was told he had breast cancer…

“They 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’re under stress. If you’re a platoon commander and you’re about to go into a platoon attack, you’ve got to know how to do it and so you have an aide memoire so you can say ‘have I done this’ or ‘have I done that’. 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’m in now. They give you little things such as telling you ‘you’re going to have a wobble’ because everyone has a wobble; you’ve just had cancer. It’s a case that you may turn around and say that you’ve got over it but you’re not always going to get over it in the way that everybody else thinks, and you’ve got a support group around you and that’s another good thing.”

Treatment was swift in Rick’s 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 “when I’ve got people with over a century’s worth of experience telling me to take it, I’m going to take it”.

Cartridge People and the Print Pink Campaign

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.

“I’m lucky, I appear to have missed or dodged the bullet but ultimately it’s a case of me being in a much worse position if it wasn’t for Breast Cancer Care and this is the good thing about people like Cartridge People supporting Breast Cancer Care. It’s not just individual people who directly get it, it’s the families. A lot of the girls that I’m 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’s a huge killer of people, principally women. If you take the mother out of a family, you’re removing the focal point. So it’s not just people like me that suffer from it, it’s other people who suffer. I call myself a ‘breast cancer opponent’ but it’s a case of so many people suffer,” commented Rick who sadly saw the tragic consequences of breast cancer when he lost his mother-in-law to the illness.

“I 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 ‘I’m going to die’ which wasn’t the first time I’d been placed in that position but this was the first time I’d 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’t a case of I was automatically going to die. Even if I was going to die, I didn’t have to die in an undignified way. I would have lots of opportunities to choose how I did it. And that’s the thing about Breast Cancer Care, they’ll support you right through that process even if you are (diagnosed to be terminally ill) and we couldn’t do it without people like you (Cartridge People) and that is highly important.”

“I was shot in the eye with a crossbow”

Next for Rick is a fashion show at the Grosvenor House hotel in London, an event that raised £350,000 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.

Describing what happened, Rick said: “I 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’t expecting! Three years later, we actually ended up employing him in the company that my wife runs because he wasn’t a bad archaeologist he was just a lousy shot!”

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.

“I had a low stage, low grade cancer. It was 16ml (the lump), nothing major. They mastectomized me and I’m now on Tamoxifen. I was suddenly thrown into the midst of a bunch of people including the models I’ll be joining in a couple of weeks at a fashion show. Suddenly, I’m encountering people who have had it a lot worse than me. I’ve had a really easy journey compared to some of these girls. We’re talking about girls in their twenties who’ve had double mastectomies and who have had to have chemotherapy and radiotherapy and in my position I’ve not had to worry about that.

“Breast Cancer Care release a lot of resources to the NHS for medical work and what you’re doing (with the Print Pink campaign) is you’re 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.”

For information on symptoms and treatment for breast cancer care in men, click here. The Print Pink campaign will be raising money for Breast Cancer Care as they support men and women diagnosed with the illness all over the UK.