As you may already know, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma four years ago, and part of my early therapy was to radiate several large lesions located up and down my spine.

I was initially treated at a state-of-the-art facility outside the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Treatment consisted of a twenty minute session under a huge, rotating robot-like machine, for ten days.

Twice the machine broke down before or during my treatment. Once I was forced to impatiently lie on the table for over two hours waiting for my treatment to resume. They never did get the equipment working until the next Monday.

Just as inconvenient was the travel time we needed to get to and from the state-of-the-art medical center. The last thing you want to do when you are tired and sick is to endure a forty minute drive through traffic.

But the results were good. My lesions—soft tumors made up of myeloma cells—shrank like magic, allowing my bones to start to heal.

Now my myeloma is back and active. A PET scan recently found a new, golf ball-sized lesion in my right hip.

The short term solution? Radiation.

My first consult was with a radiation oncologist who specializes in hematological cancers. I was more than impressed with him. But if I used him and his facilities at Moffitt Cancer Center north of Tampa, I would be forced to drive myself more than an hour each way.

Several of my fellow support group members offered to drive me to appointments, which would have helped. But once they heard I would be treated so far away, both sheepishly decided they couldn’t help.

I titled this column, “Radiation Oncology Has Come A Long Way In Four Years!” Now that you know the back story, let me tell you how and why.

Instead of traveling a long way to a state-of-the-art facility, I learned that this time around I only need to drive ten minutes to a smaller, local Florida Cancer Institute office.

Improvement #1: Except for the most difficult cases, a patient doesn’t need to travel to a large cancer center far away from their home to receive radiation.  They can now receive their treatments at a local center.

And that’s what I did at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. I experienced my first radiation treatment in four years. I immediately noticed the equipment works similarly to the one back in Minnesota, except it is about one half the size.

Improvement #2: Today’s equipment is more exact, and does far less damage to surrounding tissue than equipment in previous years.

For a while, it looked like radiation oncology was going to become a thing of the past. At the very least, applications for the science were starting to stall.

But not now. Radiation oncology has been making a big-time comeback over the past few years. Thanks to innovations like the new CyberKnife machines, oncologists are finding lots of new ways to use radiation to knock cancer down.

Which brings us to Improvement #3: Equipment is becoming more powerful. While smaller equipment is appropriate for most applications like mine, a new generation of larger, more powerful “super machines” is being introduced.

Finally, Improvement #4 may be the most important of all: Research is helping develop combination therapies that use chemotherapy and radiation. Sometimes these combinations involve the equipment I have been describing, others use radioactive “seeds” or surgical implants to attack cancer from the inside out.

Radiation alone won‘t control my recurring multiple myeloma. But it should help shrink the growth of the largest of my myeloma lesions. And that’s good news. Isn’t modern medicine amazing?

Feel good and keep smiling! Pat