City of Hope Breast Cancer Awareness Month event celebrates ‘strength and resilience’

The statistics can be unsettling: One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. And for Orange County women, that number rises to one in seven.

In California, City of Hope estimates 34,170 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year alone.

“But none of you is a number,” Annette Walker, president of City of Hope Orange County, said to a gathered group of women. “You are mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, friends and colleagues.”

She was speaking Wednesday at an event billed as “a joyful celebration of strength and resilience” at the Irvine cancer hospital, where dozens of cancer survivors, doctors and others gathered to mark Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

“Advances in screening and precision medicine have helped breast cancer survival rates now exceed 90%,” Walker said. “That’s amazing.”

But the day was also about encouraging women to pay attention to their health and advocate for themselves and recognizing the areas where progress in the fight against breast cancer is still needed.

Doctors in pink lab jackets urged women to get screened early and not put off mammograms because the best chances of breast cancer survival will always be early diagnosis.

An initial breast cancer risk assessment should be done by age 25 and annual mammograms should begin at 40 for people with average risk, they said.

“Only 40% of women get their mammogram every year, and for certain demographics, like Asian women, the percentage is even less,” lamented Dr. Jennifer Tseng, medical director for breast surgery at City of Hope Orange County.

Sade Wilson, one of two survivors to speak at the event, was 35 when she started having breast pain, she said. Her doctor performed a breast exam and didn’t detect anything. Wilson said her insurance wouldn’t approve a mammogram because she was considered too young.

She waited another year, and the pain persisted. This time, her doctor ordered an MRI and helped speed up the insurance approval process.Two days after Christmas, sitting on the examining table at her doctor’s office, she was told: “We got the biopsy results, and it’s cancer.”

Wilson had invasive ductal carcinoma.

“It was like in the movies,” she said. “The whole room went silent, and I couldn’t process anything.”

The single mother said she did all her crying outside the view of her young daughter, who found out about the diagnosis weeks later.

“Don’t feel alone,” Wilson told others. “You are more than your scars and loss of hair.” She also advised those newly diagnosed to “be an advocate for yourself.”

She ultimately ended up at City of Hope, where she bonded with her surgeon, Dr. Veronica Jones, who wiped away tears as Wilson described being cancer-free for four years.

Both women are Black.

Black women have a 5% lower breast cancer incidence than White women, but paradoxically, they have a 38% higher risk of dying from the disease, according to Breastcancer.org.

Jones said she wanted to be a surgeon ever since she was a young girl and her grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  In achieving her childhood dream, she joined the small group of Black female oncological surgeons in the U.S.; they represent less than 3% of all practicing surgeons, according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health.

The event ended with a surprise gift from the doctors and nurses to the patients and survivors: pink bomber jackets that will later be custom embroidered.

Tammy McInerney of Foothill Ranch, who has been cancer-free for two years, said she was touched at receiving the jacket at the end of the celebration. She had no idea the gathering would focus so much on the survivors, she said. “It was a nice surprise.”

“When you see pink this month — a ribbon, a coat, or one of these jackets — I hope you think about the women you met here today,” Walker said. “Women who faced something they never asked for, came through it, and then chose to turn around and offer a hand to the woman behind them.

“That is what hope looks like.”