As a show of department unity in support of Gary Fields (center, with hat) who is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, some fellow Christiansburg officers shaved their heads. The bald officers include Victor Campos (left, who is also Fields’ nephew), Steve Swecker and Sgt. Carson Altizer.

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Breast cancer in men

• The majority of men don’t know they can get breast cancer, and therefore ignore the warning signs of the disease.

What to look for

These symptoms don’t necessarily mean you have breast cancer, but if you notice any of the following, you should see your doctor.

• Changes to the breast behind the nipple — normally lumps that can be felt or a firm mass directly underneath the nipple
• Nipples turning inwards
• Discharge from the nipple, which can be bloody
• Painful and/or itchy nipple
• Skin ulceration
• Lump under the arm
• Redness of the skin

Questions and answers

Q: What percentage of men are diagnosed with breast cancer?

• The lifetime risk of a man’s getting breast cancer is about one-tenth of 1 percent, according to the American Cancer Society. For every 100 women who have breast cancer, one man does.

Q: Who is at greatest risk?

• Most men who get breast cancer are between the ages of 60 and 70. However, there are cases reported in men much younger.

What you can do

To detect signs of breast cancer, you need to regularly examine around your nipples and your pecs (short for 'pectoralis major’ chest muscles). By regularly examining your pecs, you will become more aware of how they should normally look and feel. You will be more likely to notice irregularities. If you see or feel something odd, then contact your doctor immediately.

Sources: American Cancer Society, mayoclinic.com, yapstuff.com

Gary Fields watched the people around him laugh, talk and snap photos of the Rich Creek Christmas Parade.

They were having fun, something Fields couldn't muster on that day, Dec. 6, even with his wife, Michele, and their four kids by his side.

In the last month, Fields had undergone two surgeries for what has evolved into invasive breast cancer. In two weeks, he would begin chemotherapy.

The treatment would cause him to miss time at the job he loved as a field training officer for the Christiansburg Police Department.

He might even be sick on Christmas, something he knew would disappoint his kids, who range in age from 9 to 18.

So he just stood there, dazed.

As he sat down to a pizza dinner that evening with his family, Fields continued to worry. He could die, he thought, from a disease he thought he'd already beaten once, a disease many men don't even know they can get.

Parker, his 12-year-old daughter and always the perceptive one of the bunch, asked: "Daddy, you OK? You seem sad."

Fields, 41, felt even worse.

"I seen that my mood was affecting my kids, especially my daughter, and I had to snap out of that. I wasn't going to let that happen," he said.

Fields thought of his mother. For the two years before she died in 2005, she was depressed. That's how many people remember her.

"You said you didn't want to be gloom and doom like her," Michele Fields recalled last week as she sat by her husband at his third -- and next to last -- chemotherapy treatment at Blue Ridge Cancer Care in Christiansburg.

"It took me a while to get out of that hole," Gary Fields said. "But I did, and I've been fine for a while now."

The unthinkable

Fields was diagnosed with breast cancer in the fall of 2005.

A spot near his left nipple had been tender. His wife, whom he calls "cancer or not, the best woman in the world," insisted he get it checked out.

"Thirty-nine years old. Cancer. Breast cancer, to beat that, in a male," Fields said.

According to the American Cancer Society, the lifetime risk of a man's getting breast cancer is about one-tenth of 1 percent.

"People forget that it does happen to men," said Fields' oncologist, Dr. Harry McCoy of Blue Ridge Cancer Care. "It is a predominantly female disease."

But for every 100 women who get it, one man does. In December, doctors began encouraging men to consider getting tested for genes that raise the risk of breast cancer, citing new research.

McCoy is treating at least three men who have or have had breast cancer.

Fields' cancer was caught early. It was ductal carcinoma in situ, a noninvasive form.

He scheduled a mastectomy at Carilion Giles Memorial Hospital. As a man, he said, he knew he wouldn't miss his left breast. He asked that it be completely removed. His left nipple was removed in a second surgery.

"I thought it was over," he said.

But he began feeling tightness in his chest, near the surgical scar, in October 2007.

McCoy told him that could happen. Following the doctor's advice, he tried to stretch it out under the hot water of a shower.

Standing in the shower of his Pearisburg home, Fields lifted his left arm over his head and began massaging the sore spot on his chest with his right hand.

"That's when I felt it," he said.

A lump, right at the edge of his scar. Scar tissue, he thought.

About a week later, he felt it again as he was getting dressed. He went to the kitchen to mention it to his wife.

"He said 'feel this,' " Michele Fields said, "and I could feel a knot."

She suggested he see McCoy. The doctor also thought the lump was scar tissue, but just to be on the safe side, he wanted Fields to have a sonogram.

It revealed that Fields still had breast tissue, and that tissue was filled with abnormal cells.

"This was a big surprise to all of us," McCoy said. "We were not expecting this in the least."

More bad news

Fields had surgery to remove the tissue on Nov. 9 at Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg.

Two days later, his 38-year-old brother, Randy Fields, a cross-country tractor-trailer driver from Rich Creek, died in a crash in Oklahoma.

Gary Fields was devastated. The next day, he learned the lump on his chest was cancer, not scar tissue. And this time it was invasive.

"It is the type you can die from," McCoy said.

Fields' surgeon, Dr. Jolene Henshaw, told him he would need another surgery to remove several lymph nodes. They needed to see if the cancer had spread to them.

She told him to enjoy Thanksgiving; the surgery could wait until Nov. 27.

Fields, quickly falling into a deep depression, attended his brother's funeral Nov. 15. It was also his 21st wedding anniversary.

News that the cancer was invasive "just couldn't have come at a worse time," said his older brother, David Fields, one of eight siblings and a sergeant with the Giles County Sheriff's Office.

"Gary was taking it hard," he said. "He was so sure that it was gone for good."

Gary Fields' lawyer, John Lichtenstein, has filed a $10 million civil suit against Dr. Allan Caudill, the doctor who performed surgeries on Fields in January and March of 2006, as well as Carilion Giles Memorial Hospital and Carilion Clinic.

Reached at his new office in Big Rapids, Mich., Caudill said he wasn't aware of the suit and didn't wish to comment.

A Carilion spokesman also declined to comment. It's the company's policy not to comment on pending litigation.

According to the lawsuit, filed two weeks ago in Roanoke Circuit Court, Caudill noted in his operative report that "all of the breast tissue was removed" and indicated to Fields "that there was no risk for recurrence of Mr. Fields' breast cancer."

Because the breast tissue was not fully removed, the lawsuit claims, the cancer was able to progress.

Of the 14 lymph nodes removed from under Fields' left arm, one was cancerous.

"One in 14," Fields said. That meant it had spread from his breast, but he knew it could have been worse. "It could have been 14 out of 14."

Not himself

People who know Fields call him the most upbeat, optimistic person they've ever met.

"I can't say that I've ever seen Gary in a bad mood or depressed," Christiansburg police Chief Mark Sisson said. "There's just some people that you know genuinely are good people. That's Gary."

"He's got that attitude that he looks on the good side of things, on the positive side of things," McCoy said.

But for a while late last year, the medical drama took its toll.

One November morning, Fields woke up with a pain in his ribs. He remembered hearing that the cancer could invade his bones and convinced himself that it had.

At one point he told his wife he wanted to pick out a cemetery plot. Michele Fields wouldn't let him.

"He was really bad, real depressed right before Christmas," said Victor Campos, Fields' nephew, close friend and fellow Christiansburg police officer.

At a family dinner, the 6-foot-2-inch, 270-pound Fields hardly ate.

"Normally me and him, we can put down some food," Campos said. "But it wasn't him. He didn't do nothing. He didn't say nothing. He just wasn't himself."

Fields had his first chemotherapy treatment at McCoy's office on Dec. 14.

"They give me two bags of poison. Pretty much that's what it is," he said. "To kill any cancer cells that may be loose in my body. And it feels like poison. I get so sick."

McCoy said the treatment's effects vary. Some people feel fine a day or two after a treatment. Others get severely ill.

It took Fields 10 days to recover from that treatment.

"I prayed and prayed for a good Christmas," he said.

By Christmas Day, he felt OK again. Not good, but OK.

In late December, he went back to work for two days. The first fell exactly two weeks after the chemo.

As he waited for a crash-investigation class to start, Fields told Campos that this was the day his hair could start to fall out.

Fields reached up and tugged at it. He hadn't expected it to come out, effortlessly, in his hand.

"I didn't think it would bother me but it did a little bit," he said. "Kind of like defeat, I guess."

As they listened to an instructor tell them how to fill out a new crash form, Fields thought about his hair.

Campos reached over and pulled out a chunk of it. "And he just cackled," Fields said.

"Most people probably would have punched me if I pulled their hair out," Campos said.

Fields was grateful. "He just turned it to funny," he said.

Then Christiansburg's officers began shaving their heads. First it was two, then a half-dozen, then a dozen more. Nearly 30 Christiansburg officers, including Sisson, shaved their heads to show Fields their support.

They supported him in other ways, too.

They visited him when he was in the hospital. They voted him Officer of the Year. They collected money for his family and took them food.

For Christmas, the town gave each officer a $25 gift card to Wade's grocery store.

"Probably half the department stuck theirs in my mailbox," Fields said.

Though Fields' insurance has covered most of his bills, his illness has still been a strain for the family. Michele Fields works two jobs, one as a bus driver for Giles County Public Schools and the other at Papas Pizzeria and Subs in Pearisburg. She often works at Papas in between her morning and afternoon bus routes.

"The police department, the support they've given," Michele Fields said, shaking her head. "Gracious, it'd be enough to pull somebody out of a funk."

Moving forward

Gary Fields will turn 42 on Feb. 26.

"If I can just get to that day," he said, "and get to feeling good again."

It will be 11 days after his fourth and final chemotherapy treatment. By then, he figures, he will have recovered from the effects and be back at work.

He doesn't know when he'll be able to get behind the wheel of his patrol car again.

He and Officer Terry Osborne share the car marked 701. Fields got to ride in it a couple of weeks ago when he went to lunch with Osborne.

"I miss it," he said. "Can't wait to get back."

But that will have to wait until he's able to regain the range of motion he has lost in his left arm because of tightness caused by the removal of the breast tissue.

Until then, he's acting as the police department's accreditation manager, working from a desk in Lt. Chris Ramsey's office. It's a big and sometimes tedious job, finding and organizing all the documents needed to make sure the department is reaccredited by the state. But it's one Fields doesn't mind doing.

"Because they've been good to me I'm going to work my tail off to get this done," he said.

"I think being here is good for him," Sisson said. "It's good for us, too."

The pain from Fields' surgery still isn't gone. Fluid has built up on the left side of his chest, the side that's now visibly concave under a T-shirt, and accumulated under his left armpit.

Fields wears a bandage wrapped tightly around his broad chest to control the swelling, something he has learned will likely remain an issue for the rest of his life.

He's undergoing physical therapy to try to train his remaining lymph nodes to deal with the fluid, which couldn't be drained with a needle.

But you wouldn't know any of this from talking to Fields.

It took him at least three tries over a month to dig out of a state of what he calls "gloom and doom," but now that he's out of it, he said, he's out of it.

A man of strong faith in God, Fields credits the people who have prayed for him and those who rave about his optimism with helping him hold on to that faith.

"I don't think those guys realize what they've done for me," Fields said. "I mean, I've thanked them, but they don't know the depression they pulled me out of."