Salisbury man fighting breast cancer works to boost awareness.

Larry Latamondeer first felt the knot in his chest in 2014 and knew it shouldn’t be there. In less than three weeks, he was in surgery, having a mastectomy. “Unbelievable. Unreal," Latamondeer, 48, of Salisbury, thought when he was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, which means estrogen, progesterone and a gene known as HER-2/neu, the three most common receptors known to fuel breast cancer growth — are not present in the tumor. “Patients who have triple negative breast cancer do not respond to hormonal therapy and are instead advised to undergo chemotherapy," Mark Vellek, a medical oncologist at Missouri Cancer Associates, said. "This cancer is often very aggressive and tends to grow and spread quickly." There have been very slight increases since 2014 in the number of men diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. The American Cancer Society expects about 2,600 men to be diagnosed with the disease and about 440 to die from it this year. About one in eight women can expect to be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime; for men, the risk is one in 1,000. “In male breast cancer, the problem is because it is rare, there aren't huge studies about how to treat it," Vellek said. "Treatment is based on tested treatments in women.” Latamondeer started 16 weeks of chemotherapy in 2014 and thought that he had won the battle. Less than two weeks after the treatments, though, his health took a bad turn. He felt worse and had trouble breathing. He was missing work. After having x-rays and ultrasound at Boone Hospital Center, he was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Metastatic breast cancer is advanced stage 4 cancer. It had spread beyond Latamondeer's breast and into his organs. There is no cure, Vellek said. The only goal is containment. Statistics show that approximately 90 percent of deaths due to breast cancer are from metastasis, and the overall survival rate for metastasized breast cancer is only about 16 percent. more