Those pink-adorned folks you saw Saturday afternoon, clad in an assortment of crazy gear as they snapped photos and collected items at businesses in Vero and Sebastian, were participants in the fourth annual Hunt for Hope Florida, a fun-filled scavenger hunt to fund an IBC clinical research grant through the Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) Network Foundation. An equally important objective of the annual event is to educate members of the medical profession and the public about this highly aggressive yet least known form of breast cancer.
“Our community really gets involved and we love that,” said Dr. Holly Hamilton, owner of Riverside Family Dental in Sebastian, commenting on all the business sponsors who donated raffle items and prizes. Hamilton started Hunt for Hope Florida in honor of her friend Dr. Lori Grennan, a physician who lost her battle with IBC three years ago.
Despite all the publicity about October being Breast Cancer Awareness month, most people – many doctors included – are unaware of the signs of inflammatory breast cancer. The cancer primarily affects women under age 40. That is earlier than the recommended screening age, but IBC is rarely detected through mammograms anyway. Rather than presenting as a lump, the disease initially appears as an infection or even a bug bite, with little or no initial pain.
As a result, IBC is often misdiagnosed, with critical treatment delayed until it has progressed to Stage III or IV, leading to a survival rate that is considerably lower than other forms of breast cancer.
Hamilton had met Grennan, then 32, through an online children’s group. Grennan and her physician both missed the signs of her IBC, misdiagnosing it as an infection from breast feeding and treating it with antibiotics. By the time it was correctly diagnosed it had become Stage IV.
“As a medical doctor herself, she said that she couldn’t fault the doctor for not knowing, because they don’t really teach much about it in school,” Hamilton explained. “They say, ‘It’s very rare and you’ll probably never see a case of it.’ They spend like five minutes on it and then they move on to the next thing.”
During her treatment, Grennan started the first Hunt for Hope in Ohio, working in partnership with the all-volunteer IBC Network Foundation founded by Terry Arnold, an IBC survivor herself and a patient advocate at MD Anderson in Texas.
“Research is so important for this type of cancer,” said Hamilton, noting that since its founding in 2011, the IBC Network Foundation has funded roughly $680,000 in IBC research grants.
“Most of the people I meet have never heard of inflammatory breast cancer. If this reaches one person who needs to know about, it then we’ve done our job.”
