The 17th Annual CHI St. Vincent Golf Classic will tee off Sept. 21 at Hot Springs Country Club, and this year's event will raise money for 3D technology to be added to the hospital's mobile mammography unit that travels the state to give women access to early breast cancer detection.
To sponsor the event, or play in the tournament, visit http://www.chistvincent.com/giving/2020-golf-classic.
Kathy Davidson, CHI St. Vincent lead technologist/mammographer, said although one in nine women will develop breast cancer in their life, the disease is "very, very, very" treatable if caught early.
"Early detection is your best defense against breast cancer," Davidson said. "We can see things with mammography that you're not going to be able to feel until they are much, much larger. We can find things that are just tiny, tiny specs on the image that would never be felt for probably years."
She said all women should begin getting mammograms at the age of 35, and sometimes sooner if their mother had breast cancer.
"If you have a mother who had breast cancer young, the rule is the daughters need to start their mammograms 10 years before the age the mother was diagnosed," Davidson said.
Monthly self-breast exams start at age 18 for lump detection, she noted.
For the mammography unit, Davidson said it has been in use since the mid-1990s and travels to women who don't have close access to a breast center.
"They're not going to get in the car and drive an hour and a half to get a mammogram, but if you bring the mammogram to them there's a good chance they're going to come in and get their mammogram. Just offering that opportunity for ladies to get a mammogram," she said.
"So what we're raising money for is to put the new 3D mammography (in the mobile unit). We just recently went to 3D mammographies here at the Women's Center, and the 3D piece gives much more detailed images so we can find cancer at a lot earlier stage.
"We can see things that we would have never been able to see when we were just doing 2D mammographies. So we're wanting to get the bus equipped with the 3D mammography so that we can offer all of our patients, regardless of whether they are here at the women's center, or at the mobile unit, the same level of care," she said.