Jennifer Matthews: JoAnn Schwab not only beat stage one lung cancer, she feels great and is working every day.
JoAnn Schwab: When you hear 'cancer,' that's a death sentence. And especially lung cancer.
Jennifer Matthews: JoAnn wasn't a candidate for major surgery because it would have caused too much damage to her already frail lung. So doctors turned to a new treatment called CyberKnife.
Brian Collins: We're amazed by what it can accomplish.
Jennifer Matthews: The CyberKnife is a robotic arm with a radiation device on the end. Patients lay on a table, and the machine tracks the tumor as they breathe with small gold seeds seen here as numbers. They're implanted around the tumor during a biopsy. The system is so precise patients can receive three-times the normal amount of radiation.
Brian Collins: We can target the beam and follow the tumor therefore only delivering radiation to the tumor and not to the normal lung.
Jennifer Matthews: Instead of six weeks of standard radiation, it takes just three CyberKnife treatments for one or two weeks to make tumors like this black spot disappear. There's no pain and no real side effects.
Brian Collins: The major concern of the patients who've had the CyberKnife has been whether they've been treated at all because the side effects are so minimal.
Jennifer Matthews: It worked on JoAnn. Her cancer is gone. And she hopes it can also help some of the 170,000 people who die from this deadly cancer each year. This is Jennifer Matthews reporting.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services