Atrium Health unveils treatment that directly targets cancerous tumors

CHARLOTTE — Sixteen-year-old Miya Trigg is like any typical teenager, where playing softball and hanging out with her friends is what she lives to do. However, over the past year, her life has been anything but typical.

“I was getting really, really bad headaches,” Trigg said. “To where like I could take Tylenol and it wouldn’t stop.”

After several tests and scans, doctors at Atrium Health determined Trigg had a cancerous tumor at the base of her brain.

“Medulloblastoma. It’s basically a tumor that is very fast growing, and in some cases it’s aggressive,” Trigg explained.

And because it was located in such a critical part of Trigg’s brain, it required special equipment that Atrium Health did not have. That equipment delivers pinpoint radiation called proton beam therapy.

So Trigg ended up spending several months at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida.

“It kind of pulled me away from my dad and my brother. It was kind of tough on my mom to be so far from them,” Trigg elaborated. “If there was a proton beam here, it would be so much more helpful for me and my parents.”

Well, now there is. Located off Morehead Street, Atrium Health built a center to house a 110-ton proton beam. It was installed through the roof, and it was so large that it moved in a three-story axis up and down.

Radiation oncologist Roshan Prabhu called it a game-changer in fighting certain cancers. He explained one benefit of proton beam therapy is the precision of the radiation with fewer side effects.

“This Proton center will save lives, and it’s going to do it while minimizing potential side effects, and that’s really the key,” Prabhu said. So if you are trying to treat cancer here and have something you really care about next to it, like the spinal cord, heart, lungs, or things like that, you can treat very high dose radiation of the cancer and not give radiation dose to normal tissue next to it.”

Trigg said there are other benefits as well.

“That is a huge blessing, I would say, because they don’t have to travel as much and they can still see their family still go back to their family and pets,” Trigg elaborated.

Trigg continued that she is now on the road to beating cancer, with just one month left of chemo. She is already focused on her future.

“I want to go to college for sure, and I want to become a nurse anesthetist and help people because they helped me,” Trigg said.

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