Cream reduces the pain for breast-cancer patients
By Angelique Soenaire
The Arizona Republic
MESA, Ariz. (Oct. 6, 2009) -- Jesse Crowe remembers the woman lying on his imaging table three years ago. She was in her 40s, young for a breast-cancer patient, and she was tense with fear and apprehension.
"She was the type you don't see," Crowe said. "I remember doing the injection and how painful it was for her.
"She was crying. ... She described it as worse than childbirth."
As a nuclear-medicine supervisor at Banner Baywood Medical Center in Mesa, part of Crowe's job is to inject a radioactive tracer dye as part of a procedure called a "sentinel-node biopsy."
He has done hundreds of them over the past 13 years, and even though his sister is a breast-cancer survivor and his grandmother and an aunt died of the disease, there was something about this patient that convinced him he had to do something.
"It wasn't anything about what I had in my life that made me feel more compassionate about this," Crowe said. "It was that I was inflicting pain on another human being. It was, like, what could I do to alleviate the pain?"
