Wednesday, April 27, 2005
We saw the Cyber Knife specialists, Dr. Iris Gibbs, and her resident, Dr. Brett Cox, at the Stanford Cancer Center today to go over the plan for the procedure. It seems remarkably straight forward:
� A day of preparation where they fit Jacob with a plastic head restraining device like the one he had last fall for cranial/spinal radiation, and take a bunch of CTs
� A day of planning by the doctors and radiation physicists to determine all the angles and dosages to shoot from.
� One or at the most two days of treatment, each of which will last only about as long as an MRI: probably under one hour. This will happen next week.
Compared to last fall when Jacob had radiation five days a week for six solid weeks, it sounds like a piece of cake. And the side effects of the Cyber knife are nothing compared to the radiation he's already had, even though the dose is so high, because it's so tightly focused.
We had a brief moment when we imagined a typo on the MRI report measuring the tumor in milimeters instead of centimeters might be legit, but it wasn't. Still, Dr. Gibbs kept refering to it as "very small" which was gratifying. The cyber knife techique can only be used on small tumors, which answers the question, "why didn't we do this in the first place?" Also, it's most effective as a "sandwich treatment": radiation sandwiched between two types of chemo.
The Cyber Knife device itself sounds amazing. For one thing, it continuously tracks Jacob's head and automatically adjusts to any slight movement. It's accurate to the sub millimeter level. Its beam source is a linear accelerator, and it swivels around on a robot arm that can maintain that same kind of tracking accuracy.
If all goes as planned, Jacob should be admitted for the transplant "pre-conditioning" (high dose chemo) either May 16 or 23.
And speaking of May 23 - that's when ELLIE IS COMING HOME. She'll be here at least through June.
� A day of preparation where they fit Jacob with a plastic head restraining device like the one he had last fall for cranial/spinal radiation, and take a bunch of CTs
� A day of planning by the doctors and radiation physicists to determine all the angles and dosages to shoot from.
� One or at the most two days of treatment, each of which will last only about as long as an MRI: probably under one hour. This will happen next week.
Compared to last fall when Jacob had radiation five days a week for six solid weeks, it sounds like a piece of cake. And the side effects of the Cyber knife are nothing compared to the radiation he's already had, even though the dose is so high, because it's so tightly focused.
We had a brief moment when we imagined a typo on the MRI report measuring the tumor in milimeters instead of centimeters might be legit, but it wasn't. Still, Dr. Gibbs kept refering to it as "very small" which was gratifying. The cyber knife techique can only be used on small tumors, which answers the question, "why didn't we do this in the first place?" Also, it's most effective as a "sandwich treatment": radiation sandwiched between two types of chemo.
The Cyber Knife device itself sounds amazing. For one thing, it continuously tracks Jacob's head and automatically adjusts to any slight movement. It's accurate to the sub millimeter level. Its beam source is a linear accelerator, and it swivels around on a robot arm that can maintain that same kind of tracking accuracy.
If all goes as planned, Jacob should be admitted for the transplant "pre-conditioning" (high dose chemo) either May 16 or 23.
And speaking of May 23 - that's when ELLIE IS COMING HOME. She'll be here at least through June.
# posted by Ann @ 1:36 PM 
