The third-annual Katie Oppo Memorial Run/Walk will take place this Sunday at 9:30 a.m. through the Village of Flower Hill to raise research funds for ovarian cancer in memory of the late Manhasset High School alum who died due to complications from the rare disease.
The event, organized by a group of Oppo’s friends and family known as Team Katie for the research foundation created in her namesake, has been scheduled nearly a month earlier than its previous iterations in celebration of Oppo’s June 19 birthday and Manhasset High School’s June 21 commencement, Oppo’s mother Liz said Monday.
“She wanted to get to the bottom of why such an aggressive cancer could suddenly pop up out of nowhere and take your life away,” Liz said. “The feeling was to try to carry on what would have been her goal had she survived, and at first I didn’t think it was doable, but the response from the community has been overwhelmingly supportive.”
The run spans 6.19 kilometers, in honor of Oppo’s birthday, Liz said, and travels through Flower Hill, beginning on Port Washington Boulevard and passing the Oppo home before finishing at the village park.
“She was incredibly smart and sort of very wise beyond her years,” said Daniela Calcagni, a friend of Oppo’s from Manhasset High School and a member of Team Katie. “She loved to laugh and spend time outside. She loved her dogs like crazy. She just loved life and loved to have fun and hang out with us. She’d always be the first one to call to go out on a Saturday night.”
Approximately 600 people participated in the first run in 2011, Calcagni said, but rains last year cut the number of participants roughly in half. This year, she added, the organization is hoping even more sign up because the run was moved up from July to just after Manhasset High School’s graduation, when fewer residents are thought to be out of town.
Last year’s run raised $50,000 that was donated to a team of researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center working on gynecological cancers and hypercalcemic cancers.
This year, Liz said the group plans to donate $40,000 to an ovarian cancer research project at Johns Hopkins University that will focus primarily on ovarian cancer prevention, though the organization will continue to support the research conducted at Sloan-Kettering.
“She wanted to get to the bottom of why such an aggressive cancer could suddenly pop up out of nowhere and take your life away,” Liz said. “She wanted to be a doctor and she wanted to know how this could happen and what it was about and our feeling was to try to carry on what would have been her goal had she survived.”
Oppo was diagnosed with Stage IV Hypercalcemic Small Cell Ovarian Carcinoma, a rare form of ovarian cancer, in August 2010, just before the start of her sophomore year at Johns Hopkins University, where she was studying pre-med in hopes of one day becoming a doctor.
“I was away with family when she first told me, and we didn’t find out that it was cancer right away,” Calcagni said.
“She was getting some tests done and going to see a doctor and then we found out what the diagnosis was, and it was pretty devastating. Just to know that she had such a rare disease, it made people very desperate because there wasn’t much information out there on it. Only 20 or so documents came up on Google, it was very scary.”
According to statistics from the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, an advocacy group, ovarian cancer is the 10th most common cancer among women, though the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death among women and the deadliest of gynecologic cancers.
“It was months and months of bad news that the doctors kept giving back to her,” Calcagni said. “Nothing in terms of good news came her way, but it was incredible to watch her deal with the disease with the grace that she had.”
Calcagni said Oppo fought the diagnosis and did all she could amid apparently painful and exhausting treatment sessions to lead a normal life.
“In front of us, she was so incredibly strong, and behind the scenes she was also incredibly strong,” Calcagni said. “We took her to Disney World and we got passes in case she needed a wheel chair and make the days easier for her, but she wanted to walk the whole park. When she wasn’t feeling good, she would get sick and pop back up and continue with what she was doing. She didn’t let anything slow her down.”
Oppo lost the battle to cancer on April 11, 2011, and when her friends came home from school for the summer they began brainstorming the memorial efforts that would eventually become the Katie Oppo Research Fund, Calcagni said.
“We came up with the ideas pretty quickly,” Calcagni said. “We wanted to do something positive in the wake of such tragedy, and the fundraiser run/walk seemed like the most natural thing.”
After the first run, the group applied for 501(C)(3) certification, and all proceeds from the foundation’s runs go toward ovarian cancer research.
The Katie Oppo Research Fund also holds a winter concert at Munsey Park Elementary School, in which Calcagni said Oppo’s brothers perform, as well as lectures about ovarian cancer research and preventative measures.
Calcagni added the foundation meets weekly with Liz Oppo to discuss new ideas for the organization’s future.
Lately, she said, the foundation has begun the process of building a new Web site and creating an official logo.
