What seemed like a bruise was really a type of cancer

Reaching the Big 6-Oh, it was supposed to be the salad years for Elaine Tabinowski. Instead she spent the spring and early summer on her couch at home "as limp as a dishrag."

For the past few weeks, she's been feeling better and is "passionate about getting the word out about Inflammatory Breast Cancer."

It's a term she'd never heard of until two years ago.

The Columbia resident, now 62, is a registered nurse who was working full-time in the psychiatry unit at Baltimore Washington Medical Center when she discovered a "small red mark" on her breast 29 months ago.

"I had a lumpectomy in my left breast in 2001," she...