When Fort Washington resident Tammy Freeman-Burton was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2023, it wasn’t the first time she and her husband, Louis Burton, had dealt with this type of illness. Six years earlier, Burton was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer. His was a rare case: Fewer than 1 percent of men are diagnosed with breast cancer, compared with 13 percent of women. Burton was shocked to claim that statistic.
“It was hard to just accept that it’s happening to me,” he says.
Burton first noticed bloodstains on his shirt after church. His wife, a nurse, recommended reaching out to a doctor. Although a mammogram and ultrasound came back negative, a biopsy revealed dime-size pieces of cancer in his right breast. Burton underwent a mastectomy, and three days later, weighed down by a drain bag, he returned to work.
“I was angry,” he says. “I just didn’t want to talk about it because I felt, a man has breast cancer. It was overwhelming to me, so I just got in my little zone, and I said, Well, I’m just gonna keep moving forward.”
Burton and Freeman-Burton, who has a history of breast cancer in her family, started getting mammograms together. It’s a regular date: coffee, screenings, and a thumbs-up selfie to mark the moment. But a year after Burton completed hormone therapy to keep the cancer at bay, the doctor found a mass in Freeman-Burton’s right breast. The physician told them to return for a biopsy in a few hours.
They drove to Hains Point and looked out on the water. Less than a month earlier, she’d been sitting by the ocean in Belize. Now everything felt so different from that carefree vacation. Soon after, the biopsy confirmed it: Freeman-Burton had breast cancer.
“It is still not comprehensible,” she says. “My husband and I both?”
She underwent a bilateral partial mastectomy, and the team discovered stage 0 cancer in her left breast during surgery. Freeman-Burton’s treatment has included two rounds of chemotherapy and 30 rounds of radiation followed by oral chemotherapy, and now a hormone therapy clinical trial to fight recurrence. She has also undergone a DIEP flap reconstructive surgery.
“It has been a trip I didn’t ask to go on,” Freeman-Burton says. “I have this luggage, and I’m constantly unpacking things that I didn’t ask for. The pain. The emotional piece.”
Just as she took care of Burton during his battle, he played the role of caretaker. There is comfort in a partner who can relate firsthand. “It was helpful because Lou understood the shock factor,” she says. “That’s my safety net.”
Soon after her diagnosis, Freeman-Burton attended Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, an annual October walk around the Tidal Basin organized by the American Cancer Society. She found the experience inspiring and decided to form a team to raise money for the next event. ACS approached Freeman-Burton to see if her husband would be a Faces of Hope Ambassador, one of a cohort of survivors selected to share their story. “I was like, ‘Louis is not going to do this.’ ” To her surprise, Burton was ready to go public, and Freeman-Burton became an ambassador, too. Together the couple speaks out about the importance of breast-cancer screenings for both men and women.
“I believe our assignments are to make people aware what’s going on with their bodies, get screenings, get themselves checked,” Burton says. And to “let them know that they’re not alone.”
Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Takoma.
