A Fish Hoek resident is one of several patients receiving treatment on the new state-of-the-art linear accelerator (Linac) machine, which allows advanced radiosurgery and reduces the chances of side effects.
On Monday 26 June, the machine, a first of two in the Western Cape, was unveiled at Groote Schuur Hospital’s oncology unit. Tygerberg Hospital will also soon receive the R47 million machine.
Geraldine Nelson (50) says she was diagnosed with cervical cancer a year ago and started radiation therapy at the hospital this year.
The Linac uses high-energy waves to destroy or damage cancer cells.
Nelson encourages people, especially women, to go for regular health check-ups. She thanked the doctors and nurses for the support and remained hopeful that the cancer would be cured. “For me, the experience is just to go through the process and to work with the doctors. The doctors take you through the process. It’s an honour to encourage other people that you don’t need to be scared. The doctors take you through the process and I am grateful to them.”
Prof Jeanette Parks, Head of Radiation Oncology at the hospital, says the Linac machine offers electrons that will allow treatment of more superficial lesions while not damaging underlying normal tissue.
According to Parks, the hospital sees about 3 000 new patients annually and does follow-ups with more than 33 000 patients yearly.
She says the number of cancer patients increases year-on-year around the world.
“The reasons we don’t completely understand. But we are expecting in Africa that our numbers of cancer patients are going to go up exponentially over the next decade.”
Parks says common female cancer treated at the hospital are breast and cervix cancer. For men, it’s prostate cancer, head and neck cancer or gastrointestinal cancer and lung cancer.
“Other types of cancers, which are rare but might require more specialist types of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, are more difficult to treat. We treat all types of cancer here. That would be things like skin cancer, children’s cancer, bone and soft tissue tumours and the rarer types of cancer where the average oncologist in the private sector would not see a lot of these patients.”
The Linac machine will allow advanced radiotherapy techniques such as radiosurgery.
Radiotherapy is used for the local control of certain types of cancers. It can be used with chemotherapy, but it is used to focus beams of radiation onto tumours. For things like radiosurgery, which this machine is capable of, we sometimes treat lesions which are not cancer things like benign tumours in the brain that are difficult to get to surgically.”
The professor says with this machine they can treat many patients with deep-seated tumours.
“Because it has high energy capability, we can treat larger patients. We are trying to cure patients with a good quality of life. So, these sophisticated machines allow us to better protect the normal tissues and treat cancer.”
She explains that the high energy capability also ensures fewer side effects.
“We used to use lower energy to treat patients and that was associated with more side effects in our patients. Because the radiation was less penetrating, we had to use higher doses, the dose to the skin and surrounding organs was higher.
“We had less capability to use CT scans and planning to be able to do treatment from a number of different directions. Now we can pinpoint exactly where we want to treat and the sensitive areas that we want to avoid when we treat.”
Parks says the Linac allows specialised treatment of lesions elsewhere in the body, such as certain tumours in the spine, liver and lungs. She says this is because the machine is capable of taking tumour movement during breathing into account.
On the day other equipment including the CT stimulator, orthovoltage treatment and brachytherapy were also unveiled.
Parks says: “We also have onboard imaging capabilities on these machines that allow us to see where we are treating and in real-time and move the patient into the correct position if they moved out of position. All these things make the actual area that we are treating smaller. The treatment is more precise. It’s more accurate and we can better protect the surrounding normal tissue.”
Dr Nomafrench Mbombo, Western Cape Minister of Health and Wellness, says the unveiling of the machines will greatly capacitate the province to continue to offer modern healthcare services for the treatment of cancer.
“It is about the ordinary people coming from Central Karoo, Khayelitsha and elsewhere where they can be able to access all these services.”
