A Georgia woman left with a paralyzed arm after cancer treatment says she knew immediately that a radiation therapy machine -- blamed for a death and one injury in Texas -- injured her with a shot of highly concentrated radiation.
Katie Yarborough, 61, lost the use of one arm as a result of the accident.
Ten months after Yarborough was injured in June 1985, in Marietta, Ga., investigators said two men received heavy radiation doses from a similar machine at the East Texas Cancer Center in Tyler.
A 66-year-old man died three weeks after exposure to the concentrated radiation, and a 33-year-old man who was partially paralyzed is in 'guarded' condition at a Dallas hospital.
All three accidents, investigators said, resulted from a flaw in the computer program controlling the Therac 25 linear accelerators, built by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., a company owned by the Canadian government.
Robert Free, an investigator with the Texas Board of Radiation Control, said the incidents in Tyler were the result of 'misapplication' of power from the machine, which is capable of transmitting low-powered radiation for cancer treatment and high-powered beams for X-rays.
'The dose these people received was to a small local area scheduled for treatment,' Free said. 'The dose they received was much greater in that it was over a smaller area than originally intended and administered in such a way that the depth of the dose was much greater than intended.'
When an operator set the machine for treatment, then reset it to correct an error, the accelerator 'wound up partially set for X-ray therapy and partially for electron therapy,' he said.
A device that diffuses the beam for cancer treatment also failed to come on, he added.
Yarborough, who suffered from breast cancer, said she knew immediately something had gone wrong when she was treated with the Therac 25 machine.
'She (the technician) came back and I said, 'You burned me.' I was shaking and I was real teary. I felt like I was going to cry. She said, 'It's your imagination. It's not possible,'' Yarborough said Friday.
'I have this pain every day. The arm has to be exercised. I have to go to physical therapy to keep the joints loose.'
Her attorney, Bill Bird of Atlanta, said his client was referred for radiation therapy following a lumpectomy and had undergone about a dozen sessions before the incident occurred.
'She had to have a resulting mastectomy,' said Bird, who has filed a lawsuit on Yarborough's behalf. 'She has had reconstruction. The area of reconstruction has obvious swelling in it, obvious even through her blouse. They've not been able to tell her why it's swollen like that.'
Estimates are that the patients received 17,000 to 25,000 rads, The Boston Globe reported. Doses of 1,000 rads can be fatal if delivered to the whole body.
Free said the doses were administered to areas measuring about 5 by 6 centimeters -- roughly 2 inches square. The intended doses were to be delivered to a 10- by 17-centimeter field in one case and 13 by 17 centimeters in the second, he added.
'This is the first time I've ever heard of a death' from a therapeutic radiation accident, Food and Drug Administration official Edwin Miller told the Globe. 'There have been overtreatments to various degrees, but nothing quite as serious as this that I'm aware of.'
Dennis St. Jean with the Canadian manufacturing firm Friday said company officials would not comment until their investigation was complete.
