OCALA, FL (352today.com) – Lindsey Ardmore felt the lump after the plane landed in Italy.
She had been checking herself for years. Her grandmother died of breast cancer when Ardmore was 15. Her mother died of it when she was 30. Ardmore knew from a young age that she would get cancer.
“I have been prepared since I was a young child that I was going to have breast cancer,” Ardmore said. “My beloved grandma, she fought and battled ovarian cancer and breast cancer multiple times in my entire life. So, when she passed [when I was] 15, finally from it, it was very much a ‘this is going to happen to me too’ thing.”
The lump still wrecked the trip.
“I felt a lump, and I was like, ‘oh, this isn’t good, this is really not good,'” she said. She and her husband decided to take her to a doctor when they got home. Enjoying Italy was over; the anxiety was too much.
Two years after that, she was diagnosed on September 10, 2024, at 31.
She is still trying to punch a hole in the rule that delayed her own scan: Women under 40 who are told they are too young.
“The first thing I did was I called around and tried to get a self-referred mammogram, and everyone was like, ‘oh no, you’re too young. Insurance isn’t going to cover it. You’re going to need to get a referral.’ Like, they won’t even see you,” Ardmore said.
She was three months into Bronzey, the spray-tan brand she built in Ocala, when the diagnosis hit. She had insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield. Imaging centers still would not take a self-referral. Even with self-pay, she said, they turned her away.
That fight is why she is packing the Midgett Black Box at the Reilly Arts Center on October 15, 2026, for the Black Out Breast Cancer Gala. According to Ardmore, the event is nearly sold out. The event is the main fundraiser for Hot Girls Against Breast Cancer, the nonprofit Ardmore founded to pay for mammograms, breast MRIs, and ultrasounds for women under 40—scans she could not get without a months-long runaround. She wants the gala to raise $50,000 toward an ultrasound machine and a sonographer for a year, so the nonprofit can send women in if local imaging centers will not.
A local gynecologist with a mammography machine couldn’t see her until November. Ardmore made the appointment anyway, she said, because she had heard the horror stories about waiting.
“The imaging center, of course, never called me. They don’t call you. They’re awful,” she said. “So I ended up going and sitting in for hours, waiting for them to have a cancellation one day. And they ended up having a cancellation and were able to get me in. But of course, I paid out of pocket for all of that. Insurance wouldn’t take it, even though I had a referral from a doctor.”
The bills stacked up fast. From Aug. 29 to Oct. 15, 2024, she said she and her husband paid about $25,000 out of pocket before she hit her deductible. After that, coverage still left holes. A lot of things were not covered, or they had to pay first, and hope insurance reimbursed them later.
“It would have helped my family a lot,” she said of getting that first scan paid for right away. “My husband and I are both self-employed, so… I don’t know if you know, like disability insurance and stuff like that. It’s not for self-employed people; you can’t get it. You can’t get access to anything like that. So I had to work through my entire breast cancer diagnosis.”
She had “decent” Blue Cross Blue Shield. The mammogram still was not treated as preventive.
Fighting the company became routine. Insurers also rejected a MammaPrint test, which compares a tumor against a large database and helps show whether chemotherapy is likely to help.
“My insurance didn’t pay for that. They rejected that,” Ardmore said. “I have a 1 percent chance of benefit from doing chemotherapy. They would have had me go through chemotherapy. Like everything is always a fight.”
The diagnosis landed three months after she opened Bronzey. After gaining some traction with her new business, she wondered if it was too much to juggle with a cancer diagnosis.
“I’m so driven, and I was like, ‘no, eff this. I’m going to do this. Like, I’m going to grow this business, and it’s going to help me compartmentalize the fact that I got breast cancer,'” she said. “So, I ended up hiring somebody way before I was ready to hire, but it ended up growing Bronzey faster than I could have imagined.”
Anxiety was already part of how she moved through the world. After the diagnosis, it took over the nights.
“I cannot tell you the anxiety,” she said. “I was up in the middle of the night with insomnia from the anxiety and from the stress. And then I come to find out, anxiety is actually a symptom of breast cancer. There’s a doctor here in town who says that, and I’m like, it makes a lot of sense because your estrogen usually is so high.”
At home, she tried to keep the illness from the lives and worries of her children.
“I got two kids that didn’t know I had cancer,” she said. “So, living day to day is really hard when you’ve got cancer because you’re like, I’m dying. You know, if I don’t do anything about this, I’m going to be dead. And my kids didn’t know, so I tried to maintain a happy, positive outlook when I was around them, but when I wasn’t around them, I was just crying all the time. But Bronzey helped me compartmentalize all of it, so I would just put that all away, and I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna dig in and get to work.'”
Hot Girls Against Breast Cancer started as an initiative through the salon. Events and shirts raised about $1,000 for local charities. Then she decided the work needed a sharper target—women under 40—and a paper trail for the money.
“I realized that God had put on my heart, like, women under 40. Like I always say, I was given the credentials,” she said. “I wanted transparency on the funds, and I wanted women under 40, and then I also realized, ‘oh my gosh, I’m doing this firefighter calendar,’ which kind of just fell in my lap. And I was like, ‘oh, I’m gonna raise a lot of money.’ I don’t want to just give that money to somebody who’s not fighting the good fight that I want to fight. So that’s why I started Hot Girls Against Breast Cancer, registered it as a nonprofit, did all of that.”
The calendar came through Samantha, a friend and fire wife, who asked her husband to recruit. Eight firefighters said yes for a 2026 calendar, its first year. Sixteen said yes this year for 2027.
“It’s such a fun shoot because they’re all so beautiful, you know, but telling them like, ‘don’t smile, tuck in your abs,’ you know, things like that, it’s hilarious,” Ardmore said. “It’s easy. They’re not shy. Firefighters are not shy. The funniest part, though, is we do tan them… they’re just so stressed about getting a spray tan.”
A presale of about 248 calendars at $30 each brought in roughly $5,500 after about $200 in photography and $1,800 to print. She wants to sell 1,000 and raise about $24,000 from the calendar alone.
The larger pot is already sitting in the nonprofit account. Ardmore said there is enough to help about 120 women pay for screenings. The problem is where to send them.
“That has been the process,” she said. “All year I have been trying to contact the imaging centers, the doctors here with mammography machines, trying to get a hold of practice managers to create partnerships. I had a conversation with a direct primary care person who was like, ‘Yes, I can help you,’ and then they ghosted us. So all year I have been trying to get imaging centers to be willing, and no one’s willing to help with women under 40. Or call me back. That would be like the nicest thing if someone would just call me back.”
That is why the gala exists.
“I think I would prefer to create something where… The nonprofit has control of imaging, and so that’s why I decided to do the gala this year, so that we could just like kickstart it and say, you know, you guys don’t want to help? That’s fine. We’ll take these women free of charge.”
Hot Girls Against Breast Cancer is aimed at women under 40, but Ardmore said the salon still talks about breast health with women over 40. The end goal is an imaging center where a woman can self-refer, get a radiologist read, and send the results back to primary care if something needs follow-up.
“There’s no reason for you not to be able to go get a self-referred screening. There’s just no reason for it. It’s just a money thing,” she said. “The American Cancer Society, they follow their rules, and I mean the rules were created, you know, 30 years ago.”
She has been told those recommendations are why a young woman cannot walk in for a free mammogram the way she can walk in for a Pap smear.
“That recommendation was created what, 40 years ago, and our world has changed significantly since then,” she said. “I think it will change eventually, and we need to be the voices of change. One day, Hot Girls Against Breast Cancer is not going to be needed because women will be able to get screened just like you’re able to go get your Pap smear.”
Another bottleneck, she said, is staff. Marion County does not have enough ultrasound technicians for diagnostic breast imaging, which is why appointments stretch for months.
“That is a massive problem in Marion County, and that is why you’re waiting forever to get in to see somebody,” she said.
Until the system moves, she wants any young woman in Marion County who is being told she is too young to call her.
“She can call me, and I will advocate the heck out for her,” Ardmore said. “I have a lot of girls that reach out to me saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. I have no idea who to call.’ And I try to connect them with people that can help them. You know, even if they don’t have primary care, let’s get you into a primary care.”
The first step after receiving a diagnosis, she said, is learning to push.
“Their first step is that they need to learn to advocate for themselves. It’s like a lifelong thing that they’re going to have to do. Don’t sit on it, work on it, get into it with somebody, and if you’re struggling, you can always reach out to me.”
What she wants the community to hear is simpler than a calendar or a black-tie night.
“I just want them to see women under 40 as valuable members of society enough to give them screening, or to call them back, or to like get them in.”
To learn more, visit hotgirlsagainstbreastcancer.com/gala.