Attorney Mark credits research for allowing him to keep doing what he loves during and after treatment for breast cancer
“I tend to live my life as if I haven’t had it,” Mark Lutes said about having navigated cancer since the late 1980s, when he was first diagnosed and treated for testicular cancer.
About two decades later, Mark—an attorney and breadwinner for his wife, Jean, and their four children—felt a suspicious lump in his breast. Jean said “neither of us really panicked at first,” so Mark waited a month and saw his internist, who said it was most likely a benign lipoma like Mark had experienced before. But then he started experiencing changes to his nipple.
“Being a cancer veteran, then we started getting concerned it could be cancer,” Jean said.
When the doctor’s office called, asked Mark to come in, and confirmed the lump was cancerous, Mark and Jean both knew it was going to be serious.
“We both knew the tumor had been there a while, so it wasn’t going to be stage 1 breast cancer,” Jean said. “We know it was not going to be fine. I was freaked out because in my mind, breast cancer was always a death sentence, and we had four little kids.”
Asked if he had any awareness of the fact that men could get breast cancer, Mark answered very simply: “No.”
Mark was diagnosed with stage 3 estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation throughout 2008.
“It wasn’t fun—I lost my hair and appetite and all that—but we got through it,” Mark said.
In 2017—experiencing a mass on the side of his face—Mark learned his breast cancer had metastasized to his skin, requiring another surgery and “very discomforting” radiation to his face that made it hard to eat and drink. After, his doctor started Mark on Tamoxifen to prevent further recurrence, and he remains on it to this day.
Through all of his bouts with cancer, Mark said, it was important for him to keep working.
“I have enjoyable work, and I have a lot of responsibility,” he said. “I wanted to stay working and support my family and just get through it.”
Jean said anyone who knows Mark knows that “he was not going to let breast cancer stand in his way.”
“Mark is very driven, and I can tell you he was never, ever going to let a disease stop him from providing for his family. Never. It was never going to happen,” she said.
Even now, having had a metastatic recurrence and knowing he’ll likely need another line of therapy in the future, Mark doesn’t dwell on the disease.
“My constitution doesn’t allow it. It’s not hard for me to look past it,” he said. “At some point, I probably won’t be able to. But I’ve been super blessed to be able to just soldier through it and handle it more as a temporary annoyance.”
Today, Mark and Jean credit research for the fact that he’s been able to do what he loves and mostly have breast cancer fade into the background to the point, Mark says, he forgets he has it.
“Thanks to all the research that’s been done, metastatic breast cancer can be managed as a chronic condition,” Mark said. “I’m living proof of that. I’ve been managing cancer for 40 years. At some point, I’ll probably need a next-line therapy—and I’m crossing my fingers that through research, that therapy will be available.”
