SHARING expertise
SEVEN THINGS YOUR RADIATION ONCOLOGIST WANTS YOU TO KNOW BY AMBER SMITH
Linda Schicker, MD, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at Upstate, tells what to expect when you face radiation therapy. She sees many patients at the Upstate Cancer Center’s radiation oncology office in Oneida, at 605 Seneca St.
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Our goal is to kill the bad cells and spare the good cells.
“Radiation is composed of little packets of energy called photons. When those photons interact with matter like the human body, they can either directly or indirectly damage the DNA strands. ey don’t just damage the DNA strands of normal cancer cells. ey can also damage the DNA strands of your normal cells. “Cancer cells lose their repairability. Sometimes they’re killed immediately. More oen, they will have breaks to that DNA strand, and they can’t fix it, and aer several breaks the cell eventually dies. Depending on where the cell is in the cell cycle, it can be more sensitive to that. Chemotherapy can also make it more sensitive to that kind of damage. “Regular cells are also damaged that way. But, if we give a minimum of six hours between hits of radiation therapy, normal cells can repair that damage, up to a point. “So, we can’t give too much at once, and we can’t give the treatments too close together, or we would kill the normal cells too.” 12
CANCER CARE
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The ionizing radiation we use is the same that is used for chest X-rays, just stronger.
“Radiation only affects what it hits. If you have a cancer cell on the end of your nose, and I’m treating your breast, it won’t do anything for the cancer cell on the end of your nose. “e radiation travels through you, in a straight line. It doesn’t stay in you. It doesn’t circulate in your body like chemotherapy does. “External beam radiation is just like getting a chest X-ray. You can’t feel it, see it or touch the radiation. You won’t know anything has happened.”
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Treatment may also come through radioactive decay.
“Another type of radiation therapy is called brachytherapy. It’s something you either put inside the body permanently, or that you can put in temporarily with an applicator. “When we do a radioactive seed implant in a patient with prostate cancer, we put in 80 to 100 very tiny radioactive seeds, smaller than a piece of rice. ose are implanted into the prostate. ey stay there permanently. As the seeds are sitting there, they give off radiation by radioactive decay, and eventually they lose their radioactivity. upstate.edu/cancer l winter 2019
