Word: breast
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When Arlene Horwitz, 63, was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was determined to do whatever it took to defeat the disease. She endured a mastectomy, eight hours of surgery for breast reconstruction and months of chemotherapy. After all that, doctors felt one more treatment was required: radiation therapy. And that's when Horwitz almost lost her resolve. Not because it hurt. (It didn't.) And not because it was inconvenient. (It was; she had to show up at the radiation center every morning for six weeks.) The problem was emotional. "I could deal with everything else, but as crazy...
...alone in fearing radiation, and now some doctors are rethinking the whole business. An array of new approaches, from tiny implanted balloons to radioactive coils placed in the breast while a woman is still in surgery, may forever change the way women are treated for breast cancer. A small group of physicians think that for some patients it may be possible to confine radiation to a small area surrounding the tumor, eliminating the practice of blasting the entire breast. The new "mini" treatments may enable women to receive a full course of radiation - which currently takes six weeks or more...
...moment, most breast cancer patients are given a choice of mastectomy - removal of the entire breast - often followed by chemotherapy, or lumpectomy - removal of the tumor and a small amount of surrounding tissue - usually followed by radiation treatments. The prospect of undergoing weeks of radiation, however, is so frightening that fully half of early stage breast cancer patients who could keep their breasts choose not to, largely because they fear getting zapped...
...radiation is not without side effects: it's exhausting and it can make the skin less pliant, rendering breast implants a near impossibility. Sometimes radiation causes the skin to take on a sunburn-like sheen. In rare instances, it can damage the lungs or heart. Physicians hope that carefully restricting radiation to a small area will eliminate many of these problems - including the fear factor...
...removal of the tumor. In 25 minutes, the device emits all the radiation that's needed; then it's removed. So far, the coil has been tested on only 15 patients, who were treated about a year and a half ago. None of the 15 has seen their breast cancer return...