Fighting Cancer in Africa - Voices of doctors and patients (IAEA) April 2006
It's my job: The radiation therapist
Milly Bowenge: Therapy Radiographer, Mulago Hospital
Summary:
After a patient's treatment plan has been prepared, it is the radiation therapist who delivers the radiation. Giving her patients hope makes Milly Bowenge's job worthwhile but she is frustrated when the machine breaks down and she is unable to give treatment. With one machine in Uganda and cancer on the increase, she hopes that soon there will be more machines and more treatment centres to fight cancer in Africa.
Suggested introduction:
When a cancer patient comes for treatment it is the radiation therapist -or therapy radiographer- who administers the dose of radiation. Following the treatment plan that has been drawn up by the medical physicist, the radiographer takes the patient into the treatment room. It has a heavy steel door and thick concrete walls. Inside, underneath a big metal arm, there is a bed where the patient has to lie absolutely still in the correct position so that when the powerful rays of energy are beamed out from the radio-active source they will hit the cancer and not the healthy cells around it.
This is where Milly Bowenge works. This is her story.
Tape in:
Well it is about 3pm...
Tape out:
...Africa and in Uganda.
Closing Announcement:
A media toolkit for reporting on cancer and its treatment. This pack has been produced for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Transcript
Bowenge
Well it is about 3pm, I have just done with my 8 hour work. 8 hours may sound lengthy but it is nice, it is fun having to offer someone a hope, keeping hope alive. My name is Milly Bowenge, I am a Therapy Radiographer. I specialise mainly in using radiation to treat. As a therapy radiographer I take the patients, set them up, treat them, then after that I have to counsel them. So I have to tell them the side effects from radiation, because as much as it is to reduce the tumour which is the cancer, this time there are side effects which they are expecting. So during my counselling I am letting them know of the side effects.
When the machine is turned on gamma radiations are now coming out, they are being produced. So when they get to the body, in such a moment I expect the destruction of the tumour becoming smaller. What I visualise: the big tumour reducing to something small. And I think however, the worst moments are when the machine breaks down. Like now, I have just finished and it was so unfortunate that after my last patient the machine broke down. So it gets so frustrating both to me and my patients because there is not any other treatment so I feel terrible. We literally have one machine in the country so I would have desired to have more because what I have discovered at such a time is there are more people who are ill, who are suffering from cancer. So at the end of the day we handle very few patients. So I would feel comfortable if there were other machines in other centres to fight cancer in Africa and in Uganda. End of track
