Nobody Warned Me the Waiting Room Would Be Pink

The Mirror at Half Past Six

I found it while I was shaving. That is the part people find hardest to believe, so I always say it first.

I had my head tilted back, working the razor under my jaw, and my left hand was resting flat on my chest the way it always does to keep my balance. My fingers pressed on something small and hard just to the side of the nipple. About the size of a dried pea. It did not hurt. It did not move much. I pressed it again, then again, the way you keep pressing a bruise to check it is still there.

Then I finished shaving, because I am sixty-three years old and I have refereed rugby matches in front of thirty thousand people and I am not a man who stops halfway through something because of a pea.

I told nobody for nine days.

What I Believed About Men and Breasts

I spent twenty-four years with a whistle in my mouth, mostly in the Free State, a few seasons in the bigger competitions. You learn on a rugby field not to show anything. A player is screaming in your face, a crowd is booing, a coach is gesturing at you from the stand, and your job is to stand still and say "Penalty, blue, not rolling away" in a voice like a closed door.

So I knew how to hide things. And I knew, or thought I knew, that breast cancer was a women's illness. My wife's sister had it. Two ladies from church had it. I had worn a pink ribbon on my referee's shirt for a charity match in 2011 and felt very modern about it. Not once did it cross my mind that the thing under my fingers in the mirror could be the same thing.

On the ninth day my wife, Elmarie, caught me pressing it while I watched the news. She has been married to me for thirty-eight years. She knew immediately that something was wrong, because I do not touch my chest while watching the news.

"Show me," she said.

The Doctor Who Did Not Laugh

I fully expected our GP, Dr Venter, to laugh at me. I had rehearsed the conversation in the car, prepared to be told it was a cyst or a muscle or fat from too many koeksisters.

He did not laugh. He did a careful Breast Examination, right there in his rooms, with the kind of seriousness I had not expected. He asked whether anyone in my family had had breast or prostate cancer. He asked about my medication. He asked whether I had noticed any discharge or any change in the skin.

Then he told me something I did not know. That men get breast cancer too. Not often, much less often than women, but it happens, and that men tend to find out late because they do not look and because they are embarrassed to say anything. He said the most important thing I had done was to come in, and the second most important thing was to stop waiting nine days next time.

He referred me for imaging. When he said the word, I genuinely thought he had made a mistake.

"A Mammogram?" I said. "For me?"

"For you," he said.

The Waiting Room

Nobody warned me the waiting room would be pink.

I do not mean that as a complaint. It was a perfectly pleasant room, with soft chairs and a water cooler and a rack of magazines. But there was pink in the cushions, pink in the posters, a little pink ribbon sticker on the reception desk. I walked in wearing my old Cheetahs fleece and immediately felt like I had walked into the wrong change room.

There were five women already waiting. One of them, a lady of about seventy with silver hair cut short, looked up at me, then at Elmarie, then back at me, and I could see her deciding I was the husband.

When the receptionist called my name and not my wife's, the silver-haired lady's eyebrows went up. Then she smiled at me. Not a pitying smile. A sort of welcome-to-the-club smile.

While I filled in the forms, my pen kept hovering over the questions. Date of last menstrual period. Am I pregnant. Am I breastfeeding. I wrote "N/A" so hard the pen nearly went through. Elmarie took the clipboard away from me gently and finished it.

The Conversation I Did Not Expect

The silver-haired lady's name was Rina. She was there for her yearly check, she said, the way you would say you were there to get your car serviced. She had been coming every year since she turned fifty. She told me about the first time she had come, how terrified she had been, how her hands had shaken so much she could not hold the paper cup of water.

"And now?" I asked.

"Now I bring a book," she said, and held one up. A thick crime novel with a bloodstained knife on the cover.

Another woman, younger, perhaps forty, said quietly that her mother had died of breast cancer and that she had been putting off her first appointment for two years because she could not face it. She was there that morning because her daughter had booked it for her and driven her and was waiting outside in the car to make sure she did not leave.

I sat in that pink waiting room and listened to these women talk, quite casually, about the fear I had been carrying alone for nine days, and I felt something loosen in my chest. Not the lump. Something else.

I had spent my whole life thinking bravery looked like standing still on a field while a crowd shouted. That morning it looked like a woman with a crime novel who came back every single year.

The Machine

I will not pretend it was pleasant. A mammogram is not designed for a flat, hairy chest. The radiographer, a calm woman named Precious, had clearly done this for men before and was entirely professional about manoeuvring what little there was of me into the right place. There was pressure, and it was uncomfortable, and it was over quicker than I expected.

She also did an ultrasound. She did not tell me anything, because that is not her job, but she did say, as I was buttoning my shirt, "You did the right thing coming in quickly."

I nearly told her it had been nine days. I did not.

The Result

It was a benign lump. A gynaecomastia nodule, connected, my doctor thought, to a blood pressure medication I had been on for some years. He changed my prescription. He told me to keep checking. Over the following months the lump softened and shrank.

I know how lucky that makes me. I know that not every man who walks into that pink waiting room walks out with good news. Rina, the silver-haired lady, told me before I left that a man from her church had found his too late, because he had been too proud to say anything to anyone for over a year.

What I Do Now

I am a talker now, which surprises everyone who knew me with a whistle.

At the referees' society dinner last month, during the speeches, I stood up and told the whole room about the pea under my thumb in the mirror. There were about sixty men there, most of them over fifty, most of them exactly as stubborn as I had been. You could hear a fork drop. Afterwards, three of them came to find me privately by the braai. One of them had found something months ago and done nothing.

I drove him to his GP myself the following week.

My wife says I have become a nag. Every November, when the shops fill up with moustache posters for men's health, I send a message to every man in my phone book reminding them to check. And I make a point of saying that Mammograms are not just a women's thing, even though they mostly are, because if one stubborn old referee had known that earlier, he might not have spent nine days pretending a pea did not exist.

I still have the old Cheetahs fleece. I wore it again to my follow-up. This time, when I walked into the pink waiting room, I nodded at the women already sitting there, and one of them nodded back like she knew exactly why I had come.