Second-time breast cancer survivor first to ring new gong to mark end of treatment
Beryl Woodcock was the first patient at Lakeridge to hit a new gong placed in the radiation therapy department to mark the end of treatment. Woodcock had just completed radiation treatment for her second case of breast cancer.
By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express
When Beryl Woodcock hit the gong outside of the radiation treatment room at Lakeridge Health, she knew she had accomplished something great – she had beaten breast cancer. Again.
And the biggest concern Woodcock had after completing her final treatment? It was a little itchy.
“But I have creams for that,” she said. “But I feel great. I feel very fortunate because a lot of people don’t have any energy. They lose it through this (treatment).”
The energetic Woodcock, a former Toronto Argonauts cheerleader and a flight attendant, was diagnosed with breast cancer this past May, 13 years after beating it for the first time.
After seeing her physician for some pains, she mentioned that she hadn’t received her notice for her mammogram.
Her doctor, knowing Woodcock had had breast cancer before, sent her on her way to get a mammogram, which was later followed by a CT scan and a biopsy. It was at that final stage that she knew that the news wasn’t going to be good.
“Once I had to go for the biopsy, I knew it. You know how you get that feeling? That sixth sense that you know what’s going on?” she said, speaking of her May diagnosis. “I walked into the doctor’s office and he asked what I was thinking, and I said it was positive (for cancer). He said yes.”
Ten days after she had surgery, Woodcock was at Lakeridge Health, receiving radiation treatment.
“We use a high-energy radiation beam that…treats cancer cells or a tumor, and that (treatment) is individually planned for each patient, and delivered by a machine called a linear accelerator. So it’s a very focused beam of radiation to an area that is detailed by the…radiation oncologist,” Christine Black, Lakeridge’s manager of radiation therapy, tells The Oshawa Express. “We can treat, really, most and any type of cancer in this department with the equipment, and the treatments are all tailor-made for each patient.”
For whom the gong tolls
Woodcock’s completion of treatment also afforded her the chance to be the first radiation patient at the Oshawa hospital to ring a new gong donated by the Lakeridge Foundation.
“They were purchased for the radiation therapy department so that our patients could celebrate the end of their treatment,” Black says. “We heard some comments and inquiries from our patients that they wanted a way to celebrate (the end of) treatment, and in some cancer centres, they have bells that people ring at the end of treatment. Upstairs in our systemic therapy suite, there’s a bell that patients ring when they finish their treatment there. So people were asking us for a way to celebrate the end of radiation treatment.”
Hitting the gong was a nice way to cap off the end of months of radiation treatment following her second episode with cancer, Woodcock said.
“I can hear that ringing in my head now, saying ‘It’s over, it’s over.’ It’s like the final touch on something.”