volumetric rapid arc prostate treatment

Just wanted to say Welcome Mike! I have no info on your question but others here will be along shortly that can help. In the meantime it would be helpful if you could add a signature,go to my profile, edit profile and fill it in and submit. Will be very helpful to others.

Cheers, Doug

Mike:

First, welcome and sorry you are here. You need to put your statistics in your signature so people here can have a better understanding where you stand. Did you have surgery, or just looking at the IMRT (RapidArc). A little background for you, I had the surgery, followed by the Varian Rapid Arc radiation as a follow up to the surgery. Unfortunately, the radiation didn't do the trick and I had to go on HT, as noted in my signature.

Regarding the Rapid Arc, during my 36 treatments I was only radiated for 54 seconds at a time. The way I know this is because the other guys waiting for me to finish would tell me how short it was. Side effects, pretty much toward the end of the treatment I started to have some bowel issues which cleared up after the treatments were completed.

As previous poster said, don't get hung up on being close to home for the treatment, go for the right one for you after getting several opinions. If you have any additional questions let us know. Good luck.

Due to my diagnosis, G9 cT3a with MRI indicated local extracapsular extension, I had primary radiotherapy with a Varian Trilogy with RapidArc. That machine is quite sophisticated, adjusting the shape of the overall window, and varying the intensity of a whole matrix of small beamlets. The treatment volume is quite precisely defined, and they can control exposure accuracy down to a millimeter scale.

Sweet machine, runs very smoothly, all of the treatment is done in two sweeps of the machine. It runs one direction about a minute, then a pause while it adjusts itself, then one minute back. The whole thing was about 12 minutes from walking into the vault until leaving, including the initial physical alignment each time. Very important to have full bladder and empty rectum every time.

I had no skin burns, no significant side effects despite a pretty high dose of 79.3 Gy. I'm 17 months post treatment, and still fine. The only real side effects were a sudden fatigue after every treatment, worsening as the week progressed, and night time urinary urgency (7-8 times a night at the worst, about 7+ weeks into the 9 week process). That's all cleared up and pretty much back to normal now.

Here's a link to a 1st person point-of-view video I made of one of my treatment sessions. It's not real visually dynamic, but it's very real. Most of my sessions ran just like this one:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMEEBZDQSNo&feature=youtu.be

ED has become a bit of an issue, but I'm also on Lupron and Lexapro, both of which mess with sexual function. Of course also due to those fun add-ons I don't really care about it anymore, so it's about breakeven. I'm hesitant yet to blame the sexual disfunction on radiation, but it's also possible.

My understanding of proton therapy is so far it hasn't really proven to be superior to x-ray therapy. It's much more costly. Theoretically it should be better since the protons stop at the target and don't carry on through, but it seems in practice perhaps that doesn't matter so much.