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Proton therapy for esophageal cancer: What are the side effects like?
Esophageal Cancer | Last Active: Feb 3 8:44am | Replies (9)Comment receiving replies
Hi,
I had 5 weeks of proton beam therapy at Mayo Rochester, Fall 2020. I got a weekly infusions of Tax chemo on shotgun. I continued 'work' in my room in the downtown Marriot, during COVID (boring). I had very few health issues during this period.
* Week 3: I learned what chemo brain is. My laptop keyboard and were no longer friends. My radiology nurse clued me in on chemo brain, it is real.
* Week 5: I started to 'feel the burn' in my throat, the proton beams were working! The burn, not horrible but certainly noticeable, continued until my esophagectomy in December.
After surgery in November 2020 we were playing a different game. Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Tom
Replies to "Hi, I had 5 weeks of proton beam therapy at Mayo Rochester, Fall 2020. I got..."
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You and I are not too far apart (my surgery in July 2020)... yeah... Covid was hot and heavy... my wife saw absolutely zero... could not come in for one chemo, radiation, esophagectomy 11 day stay, or my year of immunotherapy.
But I can't say I noticed much from my CROSS protocol of weekly chemo and radiation treatments... I did 5 chemo and 23 radiation. I did not have proton beam radiation, but a more general sweep of the rumor area... they wanted nearby lymph nodes to be hit since I was T3N1M0.
But as for what made me feel lousy during treatments... I'm guessing more the chemo. Was just hard for me to discern what radiation was doing vs the chemo in terms of feeling lousy. I really didn't have any external skin rashes, and not much esophageal burning (although I'm sure the radiation shrunk my tumor BIG time! I could not swallow a tiny sip of water as my treatments began... I was 100% reliant on J tube feeds. But 3 weeks into treatments I could swallow half decently once again, and I did not use my J tube at all for the next 7 weeks leading up to surgery. Let's stay NED... we've got a shot now!