DES MOINES, Iowa — Sheree Wolf's bright hair perfectly matches her sunny disposition; an outlook she's earned after a hard journey.
The Nevada woman said she was diagnosed with rectal cancer.
"The cancer was the size of a grapefruit," Wolf said.
After rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, her doctors approached her with a new type of treatment.
"And I'm like, yes, sign me up!" she said.
"This is the first time that intraoperative radiation has been used in the state outside of breast cancer," said Dr. Shankar Raman, director of the rectal cancer program at MercyOne Medical Center.
Instead of the traditional process, where doctors would surgically remove what cancer they could and later follow up with radiation delivered to the region of the cancer; intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) allows doctors to deliver radiation mid-surgery to the exact location of the cancer.
"If the cancer is stuck to areas that we cannot remove, like the bones, you know, especially down in the pelvis, we can add radiation focus to that area, and thereby deliver a concentrated dose of treatment to that area alone without affecting any of the surrounding tissues," Raman said.
In Wolf's case, IORT added about an hour to her surgery, but Raman believes what it added to her life is priceless.
"It increases the patient's chances of survival, it decreases the chance that tumor will come back," Raman said. "...It differentiates somebody from being cancer-free versus not being cancer-free."
For Wolf, being cancer-free "feels amazing," so much so that cartwheels may be on her future agenda.
"They told me not to do them yet," Wolf said. "But when I'm healed, completely healed, I plan on doing cartwheels. They may not look pretty, but I don't care."