ATTN: Getting Left Breast Radiation?

If you are receiving left-side radiation, it might be worth checking with your Radiation Oncologist to make sure your heart is completely out of the radiation field.

My RO tells me that most women with left-sided breast cancer are fine, since their hearts naturally fall outside of the radiation field. However, he also tells me that thousands of women whose hearts ARE in the radiation field are receiving unnecessary radiation doses to their hearts that could increase their risk of heart problems later.

My cancer was on the left breast, and due to my anatomy, a sizeable portion of my heart turned out to be directly in the radiation field. Fortunately, my RO was concerned about this, and referred me for a new technology called the "Breath Holding" or "Respiratory Gating" technique to protect my heart.

The technique allows the radiation to penetrate my chest wall without hitting my close-to-the-surface heart. Here's how it works:

I lie on the usual radiation table, with my arms over my head and face turned to the right. Then I'm hooked up to a breath-monitoring machine. I take a deep breath and hold it for 20 seconds. This raises my chest wall up and away from my heart. During those 20 seconds the particle accellerator is turned on and I (or the cancer) get zapped, while my heart gets spared.The ray is turned off when I exhale.

Only 50% of women need to worry about left sided BC, and of those, I gather it's a pretty small subset who need this special breathing technique. But if you are one of them, you may not want to put your heart at risk through standard radiation.

If it turns out you are one of us rare patients with your heart in the rad field, you may have to push for the breath holding technique, since is still relatively new and is not yet widely available. (It just got FDA approval this summer.)