Steven Potter
Walking into a treatment room at the UW Carbone Cancer Center, Brynn Bruijn-Hansen is calm yet determined. She’s done this before and knows she’ll be back.
She has cancer. Specifically, she has invasive ductal carcinoma, the most common form of breast cancer. Today, she’ll receive her 12th radiation treatment to — hopefully — eradicate the disease from two spots in her right breast.
“It’s kind of like a job,” she says. “I have to get through this to get to the other side.”
As she strips out of her shirt and bra behind a curtain, she chats with senior staff therapist Melodie Corcoran. Once topless, she steps from behind the curtain and the discussion shifts to Bruijn-Hansen’s plans for reconstructive breast surgery when her treatment is complete. Corcoran downplays the need but her patient is insistent.
In July, Bruijn-Hansen underwent a double lumpectomy to remove two cancerous growths under her pectoral muscle and behind her nipple. After surgery, she developed a hematoma — a swelling of solid, clotted blood — beneath her breast. “Once that goes away, it’s going to sag,” she explains to Corcoran. “That’s why I want [the reconstruction] surgery.”
During this conversation, Bruijn-Hansen lays on a long, cushioned table in the middle of the room. The table top Bruijn-Hansen is laying on slides toward the wall while its pedestal remains in place — she looks like a magician’s assistant suspended in midair. The conversation ceases.
She’s now directly beneath the Varian Trilogy Linear Accelerator — the highly precise machine that will send short, concentrated pulses of radiation through her chest.
The Varian is intimidating. It’s a huge piece of gray equipment jutting out from the wall. You can’t not stare at it. The large hook-like top of the machine — known as the gantry — resembles a gigantic baker’s mixer.
Corcoran turns on green targeting lasers that help her position the gantry, turning it so it’s just over Bruijn-Hansen’s left shoulder, lining up the lasers with four pinpoint tattooed dots on her patient’s torso.
Leaving the room, Corcoran joins radiation therapist Dustin Hebel at a bank of keyboards and monitors in a narrow space just outside the treatment room. After confirming the settings, Hebel turns on the radiation, monitoring the patient on a number of computer screens. His equipment emits a rapid clicking to indicate the radiation is firing. It sounds like a digital woodpecker. Inside the room, a “BEAM ON” sign — just like a radio station’s “ON AIR” sign — glows.
In about a minute, the first treatment is done. Corcoran goes back inside, checks her patient and repositions the gantry near Bruijn-Hansen’s right shoulder, aiming it at the second cancer location. “In the beginning, when you don’t know what’s happening, the sounds are a bit scary,” says Bruijn-Hansen of the low hum of the rotating machine.
The next treatment is delivered within a couple of minutes and the day’s radiation therapy is finished.
Bruijn-Hansen feels a tingling sensation during the radiation, and she can feel the blood in her hematoma getting warmer. Afterward, there’s some discomfort and pain. “They tell you it’s like a sunburn, but it’s not — it’s worse,” she says. “It’s very much a radiation burn. It’s hard to find clothes that don’t rub and irritate it.”
Even so, “once you get into the routine, it’s not a big deal — the biggest hassle is parking,” she jokes. “I haven’t gotten any superpowers from the radiation yet — I’m still waiting.”
She knows she’s lucky to have found the cancer early. “There’s a history of breast cancer in my family,” she says, adding that she found the lumps herself and that they didn’t show up during regular mammograms.
“In my mind, I’m cancer-free — they cut it out of me — this is just preventative,” she says before stressing the need for women, men and their partners “to do their job: keep checking [their breasts] regularly and thoroughly.”
Breast cancer awareness month: October
Women who will develop breast cancer: one in eight
Men who will develop breast cancer: one in 1,000
Estimated number of U.S. women to be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 2016: 246,660
Breast cancer survivors in the U.S.: 2.8 million
