When I joined OCF, it appeared to be a staple of faith that there was a "maximum" of radiation and that once you had radiation for oral cancer, then you could not get it again even for a recurrence. I'm living proof that's no longer true.
But I've found out the hard way that personal stories get discounted so I'm sharing a quote from Spring/Summer 2010 edition of Dr. Hong, Director of Radiation Oncology in the Virginia Hospital Center's Health Reach:
[quote]CyberKnife: A Game Changer for Cancer: ...it allows us to enter uncharted territory and treat areas that we could not before...We can also treat sensitive areas that have been p;reviously irradiated...
[/quote]
CyberKnife is not used as the first treatment, that's the conventional IMRT but if God Forbid, you need more radiation after getting the "maximum", then CyberKnife can be used. The article goes on to describe what I personally experienced both ways
[quote]Because CyberKnife is so accurate, higher doses of radiation can be administered in fewer treatments. An entire course of CyberKnife therapy can be completed in one to five visits, whereas conventional radiation requires 30 to 45 treatment sessions.[/quote]
Not every hospital has CyberKnife but it was a much more pleasant experience than IMRT. I got 5 GY a session with CyberKnife instead of 2GY with IMRT - but you still need a mask with both of them.
Charm

Thanks for the post Charm!! Really good to know. They have cyberknife in Sloan in NYC.

Great to know, Charm!! There's also one where my son was treated in Knoxville, TN
Thanks for letting us know.

Did you notice any differences in your treatment? Were you in for about the same amount of time? How about side effects? Were they any different the 2nd time verses the first? There are so few here who have had radiation twice that it is a very interesting subject for me. Thanks for sharing this info.

Christine

The CyberKnife (CK)radiation experience was better in every way from my original IMRT but some of that was due to hospital procedures and different chemo. The first and most obvious difference is completing treatment in only one week instead of 35 visits. Although the CK session was scheduled for an hour, it ended up being the same amount of time each day as the 10 minutes of IMRT since there was no backlog of patients, no machine breakdowns, and the fact that they only had to do one patient an hour in CK instead of the IMRT team racing to cram in 4 patients an hour.
Without the Eribitux aggravating the radiation dermatitis, my face was not a peeling open sore sensitive to the mask.
The CK machine itself looks more like a futuristic medical robot doctor than the IMRT machine and the lasers used to refocus the beams add to that.
The CK was so pleasant, I actually fell asleep each time, something unthinkable in IMRT. I had heard about how great CK was for treating prostate cancer and I had asked to be treated at the very beginning with CK, but my RO said IMRT was more appropriate for base of tongue cancer. He said CK was to be kept in reserve "just in case".
The only side effect that was the same with both CK and IMRT was the fatigue. No way around that bad boy. The CK actually hit me a little harder since each dose was two and half times higher than my IMRT. I hope with all you have been thru that this remains an academic question for you.
Charm

OCF news feed has an article about a brand new radiation technology - True Beam
[quote]TrueBeam�s radiation delivery times are 50 percent faster than conventional �intensity-modulated� radiation therapy with up to a five-fold reduction in the number of steps needed to treat patients ...can complete a standard 40-minute radiation therapy in less than a minute for select patients[/quote]
I know nothing about it except what I just read in the OCF news feed but it sounds very exciting for new patients. Right now it's only at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center
so the moral of this message is: keep reading OCF news posts
charm