Nelie, Gary and Darrell,
Thank you for all the information. We just got back from the RO. My mother got fitted for the mask today. We met with the RO first.
What happened was my mom was scheduled today but they called this am to tell us they could not fit her today because they did not have the size bite block they need for her (pediatric size)to set her up for the IMRT. I called them myself and was asking more questions.I said the RO told us that he was not sure of which treatment at this point. So are they going to do IMRT? She spoke to the dr. and he had us come back in to see him.
So we sat down with him and he then went on to tell me they do use IMRT but my mom would be the first person that he would be using IMRT for a head and neck cancer pt. This really scared me to hear that.
The hospital that we are using is one of the CCC center locations. The RO we are seeing said he worked at the CCC that is affiliated with this one. The main center is about 1 hr away.
At that point he said he has been doing a lot of thinking and research and he was possibly thinking of using IMRT on my mother if he was going to radiated both sides of neck and mouth on her. The reason being that it would spare the main salivary glands. He said he was leaning toward just doing conventional radation on her and treating only the right side of her mouth and neck. He said with no lymph node involvement that she has about 40-50% chance of microscopic cancer cells on right side (the side of the cancer on her tongue). So he would for sure radiated the right side of neck. If she did have lymph node involvement then she has about 80% chance of it being on other side as well.
I remember what Gary said, they had better be experienced with IMRT and to find out they have not used it on any other head and neck CA pt, I was a little worried of them experimenting on my mother.
The finial decision we came to was that she will be having conventional radiation on right side of neck and tongue.
He explained how brutal radiation can be on a 70yr old regardless of how healthy she is.
He said if this was the first time she had cancer he would even question doing radiation, because they did surgery, clean margins, no lymph node involvement stage 1-2 and according to guidelines she would not need radiation. But since she had it 15plus yrs ago she definetly needs radiaiton this time.
That is where we stand at this point. She will start radiation next week. We talked about Peg tube and he said she would probably not need one.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Nelie did you have radiation on both sides of your tongue and neck?

Thanks again
Michelle