2022 Survivor Profile - Tim Hott

Tim Hott, who was in Las Vegas to coach his recreational baseball team in a tournament had just stepped out of the shower, when he noticed the nipple on his left breast was inverted and felt a pea-sized lump. “This is not normal,” he thought.

The 71-year-old Floral Park attorney was flying home the next day and planned to bring it up at his upcoming annual physical.

After examining him, the internist ordered a mammogram that showed a suspicious mass. “As a man, I still wasn’t thinking cancer,” Tim recalled. “I thought it might be a sebaceous cyst (a usually harmless, dome-shaped slow-growing lump), that had to be drained.”

Forty-eight hours later, though, he learned he had an advanced Stage 3a breast cancer that would require a mastectomy to surgically remove his breast and roughly half of his lymph nodes in his left arm pit.

The self-confessed “fitness buff” felt that his body had betrayed him. “I have always taken pride in my appearance and thought, ‘How dare you desert me, body? I’ve taken such good care of you,’” he recalled.

Following surgery, five months of grueling chemotherapy and five weeks of radiation therapy, Tim began to dwell on his mortality.

“When you are past 70 and you know of others at that age who are gone, you start thinking, ‘Will I be around long enough to see my son become a father and see my grandchildren graduate elementary school?’”

The married father of three turned to his faith, and his wife and children for emotional support and comfort. A volunteer counselor from the Adelphi NY Statewide Breast Cancer Hotline & Support Program also provided a listening ear and coping strategies.

Cancer-free for more than two years and a volunteer counselor for the Adelphi program, Tim, now 73, wants men to know the signs of breast cancer and the importance of performing a regular breast self-exam. “If you see or feel something that doesn’t look right, that’s the time to say, hey, I should have this looked at,” he said. “Don’t die of embarrassment.”