When most people hear the words “breast cancer” they think of women. They haven’t met Mark Goldstein.

Sporting a pink visor with the number 11 emblazoned on the brim underneath the words, “I am a survivor,” Goldstein, age 65, travels the country championing the fight against breast cancer. The number 11 along with the 11 pink breast cancer ribbons that adorn his visor, he explains, represent the number of years he has survived this terrible disease.

“Men are not supposed to get breast cancer, so the lump under my left nipple went unchallenged for about three months,” Goldstein says. “Not until it had succeeded in pulling in my left nipple did it get a small amount of curiosity.”

Incidences of breast cancer in men are rare, but it does occur—this year the American Cancer Society estimates that 1,600 men will be diagnosed with the disease and 400 will die.

In early 1988, after the lump had caused his left nipple to invert, Goldstein, a resident of Randolph, New Jersey, consulted a dermatologist, who was unable to make a diagnosis. The next doctor he visited suggested a mammogram. “The result, other than my increased empathy, was inconclusive,” he says.

After finding a surgeon in New York City who had significant experience treating breast cancer in men, in May 1998, Goldstein underwent a modified radical mastectomy to remove the lump. Several months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed, but Goldstein’s battle with breast cancer did not end there.

About a year after the mastectomy, his left arm, depleted of some 17 lymph nodes, became red and doubled in size after an insect bite became infected. The infection was controlled, but he was left with lymphedema, an accumulation of lymphatic fluid that causes swelling, most often in the arms or legs. To control the swelling, Goldstein must wear a compression sleeve daily.

Today, Goldstein has joined the Susan G. Komen Foundation in pursuit of a cure for breast cancer. He and three female breast cancer survivors make up Honorary Team New Balance, and travel to Race for the Cure events throughout the country.

“The 182,000 women who will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and the 43,000 who will die, are motivation enough to participate in this race,” he says. “I, however, have an additional motivation as a male survivor of the disease to not only help the fight for cure, but to dispel the misconception the breast cancer is ‘for women only.’”

Goldstein adamantly refuses the suggestion that having breast cancer is an assault on his masculinity. “This is a platform from which my advocacy on behalf of awareness and a cure can and does reach a wider audience,” he says. “If I had announced to the world that I had developed prostate or testicular cancer, that information would likely have been greeted with a cumulative yawn. Ah, but a man with a woman’s disease, now that’s something else.”

On Oct. 17, Goldstein joined 3,430 others in the Charleston, SC Race for the Cure. “Who would have thought, that in the fourth quarter of my life a disease would give me an opportunity to directly and positively influence the future of my fellow human beings.”