If you choose to receive radiation therapy, your health care team will ask you to sign an "informed consent" form. Signing the document means:. Simulating and planning treatment. Your first radiation therapy session is a simulation. This means it is a practice run without giving radiation therapy.
Your team will use imaging scans to identify the tumor location. These may include:. Depending on the area being treated, you may receive a small mark on your skin. This will help your team aim the radiation beam at the tumor. For radiation therapy to the head or neck, you may receive a thermoplastic mask. This is a mesh mask that is molded to your face and secured to the table.
It gently holds your head in place. It is important for your body to be in the same position for each treatment. Your radiation oncology team cares about your comfort. Talk with the team to find a comfortable position that you can be in every time you come in for radiation therapy. Tell them if you experience anxiety lying still in an immobilization device. Your doctor can prescribe medication to help you relax. After the simulation at your first session, your radiation therapy team will review your information and design a treatment plan.
Computer software helps the team develop the plan. What happens during your radiation therapy treatment depends on the kind of radiation therapy you receive. External-beam radiation therapy delivers radiation from a machine outside the body. It is the most common radiation therapy treatment for cancer. Each session is quick, lasting about 15 minutes. Radiation does not hurt, sting, or burn when it enters the body.
You will hear clicking or buzzing throughout the treatment and there may be a smell from the machine. Typically, people have treatment sessions 5 times per week, Monday through Friday. This schedule usually continues for 3 to 9 weeks, depending on your personal treatment plan. This type of radiation therapy targets only the tumor. But it will affect some healthy tissue surrounding the tumor.
While most people feel no pain when each treatment is being delivered, effects of treatment slowly build up over time and may include discomfort, skin changes, or other side effects, depending on where in the body treatment is being delivered. The 2-day break in treatment each week allows your body some time to repair this damage. Some of the effects may not go away until the treatment period is completed. Let the health care professionals if you are experiencing side effects.
Making this decision can be difficult. You may find it useful to write a list of questions to ask your care team. If you agree with your team's recommendation, they'll start to plan your treatment once you have given your consent to treatment. Your treatment will be carefully planned to ensure the highest possible dose is delivered to the cancer, while avoiding damage to nearby healthy cells as much as possible. You will probably have a CT scan to work out exactly where the cancer is and how big it is.
After the scan, some very small but permanent ink marks may be made on your skin to ensure the right area is targeted accurately each time.
If you're having radiotherapy to your head or neck, a plastic mask will be made for you to wear during treatment. The ink marks will be made on the mask.
Most people have 5 treatments each week 1 treatment a day from Monday to Friday, with a break at the weekend. But sometimes treatment may be given more than once a day or over the weekend. Your doctor may call each dose a "fraction", although the term "attendance" is sometimes used to indicate how many hospitals visits you'll need to make during treatment.
During external radiotherapy, you lie on a table and a machine directs beams of radiation at the cancer. The machine is operated from outside the room, but you'll be watched through a window or a camera. Most treatments are given using high-dose-rate sources. This may require between one and five treatments on separate occasions. Implants come in different sizes and shapes, including needles, plastic tubes, catheters, capsules and rods, depending on the type of cancer and the area of the body to be treated.
Some implants can be placed in already existing spaces inside the body called intra-cavitary implants and others are placed through the skin near the cancer interstitial implant. The implant chosen for you is inserted into your body under anaesthetic.
Brachytherapy implants can be temporary or permanent. A temporary implant is removed after treatment is given. It may need to be re-inserted each time, or may be left in place for a few days to allow treatments to be completed before removal. This will depend on the nature of the treatment. While the radiation source is inside the needles or tubing, your body will emit small traces of radioactive energy.
Once the source is withdrawn, even if the implant is in place, there is no radiation left in your body. While you are being treated in the brachytherapy room or suite which may be in an operating theatre , staff will be in a shielded room observing you closely. They can start and stop the treatment as required. Most treatments take a few minutes and there is no sensation from the actual treatment. After the implant is removed, it is unusual to have any symptoms.
If needles have been used, there may be some swelling. Bleeding and infection is very rare, but may occur and require medical care. If you are being treated in a hospital using low-dose-rate radiotherapy, the source of radiation may be left inside the tubing for up to 40 hours, and you will be isolated from staff and other people.
This type of treatment is less common now. A permanent implant is usually performed using radiation seeds especially for prostate cancer. These implants stay in place.
The therapy is given over days and weeks, but the seeds become weaker and eventually stop being radioactive after some months, depending on the variety of implant used. The hospital staff will isolate you in a single room and limit the time you spend with visitors especially children and pregnant women in the first few days after the implant is inserted.
The radiation fades with time, so other people will be safe to be near you once you are discharged from hospital. Special instructions will be given about coming close to children and pregnant women while the sources are still active inside the body. Radiotherapy works by killing cells that are dividing rapidly.
This is why it works on cancer cells. It also explains why radiotherapy causes side effects, as it acts on cells in the body that naturally divide rapidly, such as those in the lining of the gut, the skin, the bladder and the bone marrow. Not everyone experiences side effects, although usually, one or two side effects occur. Side effects will depend on the type and dose of radiotherapy you receive and which part of your body is being treated.
After treatment is complete, almost all side effects will disappear. Some may return after months or years, and may affect other tissues in the treatment area. It is important to discuss side effects with your doctor because treatments are available. You should notify your doctor at once if you experience severe or distressing side effects that do not respond to medication, such as severe vomiting, chronic diarrhoea, bleeding or some other change in your health that worries you. Tell the staff that you are having radiotherapy.
It is important to remember that almost all side effects will disappear once treatment is completed. In the meantime, helpful strategies include:. During treatment, your doctor will order medical tests such as physical examinations, x-rays, other scans and blood tests to find out how you are tolerating the treatment. During therapy, it can be hard to tell how well the radiotherapy is working.
This will be assessed after your course of treatment is completed. This page has been produced in consultation with and approved by:. Before a biopsy, you need to discuss a range of issues with your doctor or surgeon.
Bladder cancer affects twice as many men as women. Bone cancer is a rare form of cancer that is treated with chemotherapy, radiotherapy or hormone therapy. Bowel cancer is highly curable if found at an early stage. But some people may need to go to the treatment center twice a day for a fewer number of weeks. Your cancer care team will help decide how much radiation is needed to treat your cancer and how often you need to get it.
Three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy 3D-CRT delivers radiation beams from different directions designed to match the shape of the tumor. This helps to reduce radiation damage to normal tissues and better kill the cancer by focusing the radiation dose on the tumor's exact shape and size. This allows the radiation oncologist to adjust the position of the patient or re-focus the radiation as needed to be sure that the radiation beams are focused on the tumor exactly and that exposure to normal tissues is limited.
This allows stronger doses to get to certain parts of the tumor and helps lessen damage to nearby normal body tissues. Helical-tomotherapy a form of IMRT that delivers radiation in a special way. For this treatment, the radiation machine delivers many small beams of radiation at the tumor from different angles around the body. This may allow for radiation to be even more precisely focused. Photon beam radiation therapy is another name for what is usually known as external beam radiation therapy.
It uses photon beams to get to the tumor but also can damage healthy tissue around the tumor. Photons are used in treatments that are given by a machine called a linear accelerator. The photon beams are invisible and cannot be felt when they are passing through the skin to the cancer. Proton beam radiation therapy uses proton beams instead of photons or electrons.
Protons are parts of atoms that cause little damage to tissues they pass through but are very good at killing cells at the end of their path. This means that proton beam radiation may be able to deliver more radiation to the tumor while reducing side effects on normal tissues. Protons can only be put out by a special machine called a cyclotron or synchrotron. The proton beams are invisible and cannot be felt when they are passing through the skin to the cancer.
Once the exact location of the tumor is known from brain scans, radiation is sent to the area from many different angles. The radiation is very precisely aimed to affect nearby tissues as little as possible.
It's called "radiosurgery" because it is so exact in where it delivers the radiation beams, almost like how exact surgery can be.
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