Voice of Experience
If it is possible, through research, to find an alternative to the mask, to remove the mask and keep us safe, I would love to live long enough to see that happen
There are a number of publications now on minimal immobilisation in head and neck scenarios in which they are finding that it’s actually better for not only for patient comfort but also for patient stability to drastically minimise the points of contact in which we are trying to immobilise their head and neck.
We’ve talked about how uncomfortable these full masks notoriously are and there is a growing body of peer reviewed literature to suggest that in head and neck scenarios, less immobilisation is actually more…and this makes a lot of empirical sense to us
SGRT in the HN setting [is] not some kind of a secondary tool that you would only use for special procedures but a primary safety tool for every fraction, every treatment.
Patients see these things (closed masks) as very restrictive, some patients have severe claustrophobia, and other patients just cannot handle it from a psychological standpoint of being pinned or held down to the table for treatment
We had an interesting case of a patient who had so much severe claustrophobia that she couldn’t tolerate the mask even after 3 different times trying to make one at CT. we ended up treating her completely without mask…this was definitely not a possibility without SGRT…the other option for her would have been a total laryngectomy