EBRT Holiday Treatment Pause

I wondered the same thing during the holiday break when I had mine done. Plus the machine broke down two days during my treatment. Techs said no worries, just get your total number of days done.

I took 3 days off by my choice. My RO and team had no problems with it, and they just tacked it onto the end. Enjoy the weekend off and Happy Thanksgiving!

It is my understanding that the radiation is doing it’s thing on cancer cells long after the treatments are done. So even with 6 days off, there is no break in the nuking if your junk

just asked my ro yesterday.. he said no problem at all.. Ed

Good to hear. I'm starting RT on Dec 20 and was told I would also have Xmas and New Years Day as "days off". I was wondering about this too.

I have wondered about this myself. Shortly after starting my Proton Tuesday, November 18, 2014, we were scheduled for Thanksgiving break the following week. The 18th was a Tuesday, so I had 4 treatments before the weekend break. I was scheduled to have 4 more treatments before the long TG break, beginning on Sunday-Wednesday before TG.
However, we had a major equipment failure so we did not resume treatments until the Wednesday before TG. We all had 2 treatments on that Wednesday (am and pm), off on Thursday for TG, followed by treatments Friday and Saturday.
There was a lot of discussion in the waiting room on Wednesday when we resumed treatments. Many men were worried that the 5 day delay was detrimental to our treatment. Some had discussed it with their RO's and the opinions were varied. Some RO's thought it problematic; others not so much, however the decision had been made that if the equipment had not been fixed by that Wednesday, we were all going to be treated with IMRT rather than wait any longer.
My RO did not believe it made any difference. My impression was that none of them really knew with certainty what the effect might be. It's always been in the back of my mind that it might just be a factor between success and failure.

Right smack in the middle of my eight weeks of ART, hurricane Irma knocked out power to most of the state, including my RO's office. The staff got everyone in on Saturday for an extra zapping before the storm hit on Sunday, and the days we missed just got tacked onto the end of the treatment schedule. Most of us are still alive I believe.

And yes, my RO stated that the RT continues to kill off cancer cells for another 8-9 months after the end of treatment. So a day or two missed probably has no real effect over the period of weeks and weeks of treatment.

I never had a 4-day break, but I had several 3-day breaks due to either holidays or an issue with the machine. Since I'm doing well several years later, I will conclude that it doesn't make much of a difference, if any.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29030906

As a sample plan for a man beginning his 40 day treatment plan on Thanksgiving week, I came up with 61 elapsed days beginning on 11/19 and ending on 1/18 with weekends off, holiday breaks of 2 days for Thanksgiving, 2 for Christmas, and 1 for New Year's. The non-treatment day ratio was 34% (21/61), just slightly more than the median of 31% referred to in the paper.
I missed 4 1/2 days so I'm hoping the study is credible.