When Edward Wilson was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, he had a lot of questions. Mainly, though, the 53-year-old Alaskan Airlines pilot wanted to know what a male mastectomy would look like. For a female breast cancer patient, it would have been easy information to find. For Wilson, it was impossible. He searched through books, brochures and Web sites, looking for pictures of men who'd had mastectomies.

He found nothing.

Wilson was on his way to experiencing firsthand the disadvantages and challenges that come with being one of 1,700 men diagnosed each year with what's widely considered a woman's disease.

"Lonely is the one word I can surely say that I felt at the very beginning—and not that I needed all the hugs or anything, it just felt lonely," he says. "There just weren't many guys for me to talk to about this."

Throughout his battle with breast cancer, the husband and father of two was inundated with images of women with breast cancer. He got tired of hearing, "Yes, men get breast cancer too, but it's very rare." That might be true, Wilson says, but it doesn't mean those men and their families don't count. "What's up with that? Kids don't want to lose their dads early either," he says, adding that the news of his breast cancer was just as difficult for his children as a mother's diagnosis would be for her children.

There were other challenges, as well.

When he started chemo, Wilson could find no information about how different drugs affected men. He attended the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in Texas and was stunned at the lack of information. "You've got charts up there about postmenopausal and premenopausal—which one am I?" he says.

When Wilson decided he wanted to tattoo a nipple onto his chest to replace the one he'd lost in surgery, his insurance provider refused to cover it. He had to remind the company that medical reconstruction coverage laws apply to men, too.

Eventually, a family member mentioned that she'd read an interview with Richard Roundtree, star of the 1970s Shaft movies, where he discussed his ordeal with breast cancer. Desperate, Wilson tracked the actor down by telephone. When they connected, they talked a long time and Wilson felt he had finally found a link to someone who understood what he was going through.

Now Wilson tries to be that link for other men. He works steadily at increasing awareness of male breast cancer. He created a poster of himself bare chested that he hangs at a booth at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium each year. He has been interviewed for television specials and has written an article on breast cancer for his union's newsletter.

Not that he doesn't appreciate the important role of female survivors. He knows that many of the drugs available to him are there only because women participated in the necessary clinical trials, and he says he is humbled by that fact. He doesn't even mind that pink is the color associated with his disease. "Do I like going around wearing a pink hat? No, I would normally not do that," he says of his first experience at a Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. "But those women were warriors and there was such an electricity in that pink that I felt it, like I was charged."

Wilson did eventually learn what a male mastectomy looks like, but not from a photograph or book. When he expressed his frustration to his surgeon, the doctor pulled out a pen and drew the incision marks on Wilson's breast. Wilson was so moved that someone had finally answered his question, he didn't wash the drawing off for three weeks. Whenever family members asked him about his upcoming mastectomy, he lifted his shirt and showed them.