>>“It was very important that we do something very quickly to help Kailee,” said Greg Gagnon, MD, radiation oncologist and director of the CyberKnife program at Georgetown University Hospital. “We started with chemotherapy and standard radiation right away. But we worried about critical structures like her pituitary gland, her teeth, salivary glands and spinal cord. The tumor was dangerously close to all of these and all are very sensitive to radiation, especially in children. So the third and critical weapon we used was the CyberKnife, which ended up being key to her successful treatment. Without CyberKnife we would not have been able to reach all of Kailee’s cancer and I know her outcome would not have been this favorable. We aimed CyberKnife at the tumor and radiated it, while missing everything else we were worried about.”
“My daughter had no side effects whatsoever from the CyberKnife,” said Kari Vance. “She was very scared in the beginning but she got used to it and did great.”
“We used the CyberKnife to get to places we couldn’t reach with surgery or standard radiation, and very importantly, without damaging other important tissue. She was a real trooper,” said Dr. Gagnon.
Georgetown physicians have been using CyberKnife to zap inoperable cancerous as well as benign lesions since 2002. Originally purchased to treat the brain, neck and spine, Georgetown’s program has advanced and expanded to now treat tumors virtually anywhere in the body. Georgetown University Hospital was the 6th center in the United States to start using CyberKnife and is one of just a handful of centers in the world that has two machines.
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