Beam On

For twenty two minutes and a few seconds today, the "BEAM ON" light was on Drew. He had his third and fourth total body irradiation today.

Drew was on one side of the LINAC 5 treatment room, a large space which allowed the LINAC (linear accelerator) to create its beam of photons and send them across the room (about 20 feet) to Drew. He sat in a recliner and could only move once - to turn around half-way through the treatment. The room's door was 20 inches thick - must be a good reason.

The team setting up and running the whole show were very impressive, explaining that photons are used for deep cancers (versus electrons for skin and shallow cancers). The accelerator creates a beam of particles, accelerates them with magnetics, and then creates photons when the particles strike a plate. The number of photons are carefully controlled by the shape of the aperture and the time for "BEAM ON" (5 minutes, 43 seconds on each side). The technician kept his finger hovering over the "BEAM OFF" button the whole time, in case Drew were to move at all.

The technology was impressive, right up to the point where they tuned the beam to reduce the radiation to certain places on the body. They used special brass plates to diffuse the photons, held carefully in place on the $4M machine's 15" lens with....masking tape. Hmmmm.

T-7. Beam on.