Patricia Shabot’s perspective on life can be summed up quite simply: “I’m 66 going on 34,” says the New Jersey jewelry store employee. “Very few things slow me down.”
Not even two bouts of breast cancer.
The first was six years ago and although it was detected early (technically a stage 0), Patricia’s microscopic cancer needed to be removed through a lumpectomy. Thirty-three rounds of radiation therapy followed.
When a new cancer sprang up in the same breast last September, a team of breast cancer specialists at Beth Israel Medical Center explained that mastectomy is the most widely recommended breast cancer treatment for her clinical situation. “I wasn’t ready to go through with a mastectomy,” Patricia recalls. This time, her radiation oncologist, Manjeet Chadha, MD, made her aware of alternative treatment options. Because she was not willing to undergo mastectomy, Patricia was a candidate for a trial using targeted treatment called accelerated partial breast radiation therapy.
For the second time, Patricia would rely on two things to get her past cancer: her go-getter attitude and a personalized treatment plan.
“I decided to undergo lumpectomy followed by a week of radiation therapy. Accelerated radiation therapy appealed to me, and sounded less cumbersome than the daily treatments I had the first time around. I’m pretty social. This was happening right around the holidays and I wanted to get back to life as quickly as possible. It was the right choice.”
Treatment gets personal
Accelerated partial breast radiation therapy targets the lumpectomy cavity. In Patricia’s case, a special kind of radiation therapy called brachytherapy was used. This technique uses tiny pellets (about the size of a grain of rice) as the radiation source to destroy any remaining cancer cells in the lumpectomy cavity. “The treatment is targeting the area at highest risk for a recurrence and is completed in five days,” Dr. Chadha says.
Candidates for the treatment include women with new diagnosis of early stage breast cancer, and those who have small, localized recurrent breast cancer removed by lumpectomy. “As physicians, we have to evaluate each patient carefully with respect to the particular type of cancer and its location in the breast before we recommend this treatment approach,” Dr. Chadha says. “In Patricia’s case, it was a viable option.”
“It was almost like a godsend to have this option available at that time in my life. Compared to my first go-around with radiation therapy, this was easy,” Patricia says.
She had less skin irritation, fatigue and breast pain this time than she did after the traditional 6.5-week course of radiation treatments in 2004. “I finished treatment on a Monday morning and was back to work on Tuesday,” Patricia recalls. “Given the situation, it couldn’t have gone any better.”
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