- [Announcer] This program was made possible by, Ed and Ann Zinke, Versacare, George and Joan Harding.

- I'm walking off the golf course at a charity golf outing.

I get a call on my cell phone, and it's my physician.

- [Narrator] Pat Purcell's life changed the moment he found out he might have cancer.

- The physician said, "You know, I can feel a palpable tumor in there, Pat, no reason to be alarmed yet.

I mean, we don't know if it's cancerous."

- I had decided to kick it into high gear, and start doing my research just so that I could be armed if we got the news.

- Cancer can be treated with many modalities but they all carry side effects.

- It was kind of a shocking experience to see how ill we made our patients.

They got very, very sick.

- We started at that moment to put together a game plan.

- I realized what was going wrong, what we were doing wrong.

We were injuring too much normal tissue that wasn't necessary.

We could do much better than that.

- I have a great career.

I have a great health.

I can't even believe I'm sitting here talking to a physician about how to take care of my tumor.

(gentle music) (chiming music) - Our blind date was the fairytale date.

We did everything from have dinner to go to a Beach Boys concert.

We rode a rollercoaster.

He took me for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage and the date lasted until four in the morning and I never saw anybody else after that.

It was sort of meant to be.

- [Narrator] Patrick and Sharon were married in 1992, and eventually settled in Seattle where Pat began working as a vice president of sales in the printing technology industry.

He also pursued his passion for health and fitness going to the gym and training for triathlons every day.

Life was great, but then Pat and Sharon's fairytale life was interrupted by a nightmare.

(tense music) - My husband, his company held an annual health fair each year, and everybody went in, including the spouses to have blood work done and just an overall health evaluation.

One of the measurements that they take is the PSA exam for the health of the prostate.

This particular year in 2011, his health evaluation came back, and there were a couple of areas instead of being in the green, one was in the yellow and one was borderline red, and that was his PSA.

- Mine had been normal for the last three or four years and then all of a sudden in one year, it had elevated by 50 or 60%.

And so that's a warning sign.

And obviously the PSA is not a perfect indicator of cancer, but it's an indication that something's going on in the prostate.

- Prostate cancer still is the second leading killer of men from cancer, and it still kills more people in the United States than colon and rectal cancer combined.

When PSA gets higher, that certainly adds to the risk.

Prostate cancer can be treated with, there are many modalities of, radiation therapy, surgery, hormone treatment, chemotherapy.

There's immunotherapy, but they all carry side effects.

You can have diarrhea or proctitis problems with impotence.

Problems with urinary incontinence.

Side effects from treatment have a huge impact on quality of life.

- [Narrator] The increase in Pat's PSA was significant.

So when doctors discovered a tumor in Pat's prostate as well, they immediately ordered a biopsy.

- The biopsy was on a Friday, they took 12 tissue samples and the doctor said, we'll have the results, you know, sometime by about Wednesday.

So we knew that we had this long weekend to to think about it.

- [Narrator] The biopsy would reveal whether or not Pat's tumor was cancerous.

(gentle music) Three decades before Pat's alarming news, Dr. James Slater was searching for a different way to treat cancer that wouldn't have such devastating side effects.

- When I started my residency training, it was kind of a shocking experience to see how ill we made our patients.

They got very, very sick.

Some of them had to stop treatment and recuperate for a week or so and then come back.

And this was all bad because it reduced their chance for cure and made severe misery for them as an individual in the entire family as well.

And from my earlier work in physics, I realized what was going wrong, what we were doing wrong and the the answer was simply we were injuring too much normal tissue with our radiation and that wasn't necessary.

We could do much better than that.

- Well, I think the idea of positioning a patient, and getting normal tissue out of the way is obviously a fundamental part of this field.

- I began to make positioning devices for a patient where I could hold them into the correct position throughout their treatment set them up day to day, very accurately.

- Now, you don't wanna move the patient because you know the insides are squishy.

So if you move a patient a little bit, you've moved the tumor from where you think it is by several tenths of an inch, and you've lost the location.

So you want essentially the patient to be relatively fixed.

- I began to make devices to contour the x-ray beam so that we could trim down from treating the normal tissues as much as possible.

And you could see this did make a difference, but it wasn't enough - [Narrator] Because traditional x-ray beams could damage surrounding tissue, Slater began to explore using a different type of beam altogether, protons.

- [ Dr. Slater] Protons were used as a experimental particle in the physics laboratories.

Robert Wilson, the physics from Berkeley, was the first to publish that concept back in the mid 1950s.

He wrote that this was a particle that could do much better for us patients.

- [Narrator] Building on Dr. Wilson's work, Slater began studying the benefits of protons over traditional x-rays.

- X-rays were not good enough because we could never control them in three dimension.

It just wasn't physically possible, and we knew that.

So if we were going to treat patients with a three dimensional beam, we had to go to a heavy charged particle.

Neutrons had no charge.

Electrons were not heavy enough.

Protons were.

- [Narrator] The difference between regular x-ray radiation and proton , was that x-rays went all the way through affecting the tissue from one side of the body to the other, protons would penetrate to a certain depth and then stop.

- So what he started doing early on was to develop a way of showing where the radiation was going inside a patient.

And he actually developed the first CT based treatment planning system in the world here, which is now commonplace around the world in treating cancer patients.

And that was done because he needed that to allow him to eventually get into protons.

- [Narrator] A few days after his biopsy, Pat received a call with the results.

- I'm walking off the golf course at a charity golf outing and as I'm walking off the golf course, I get a call on my cell phone and it's my physician.

And he said, he said, "Pat, it's cancer."

- I was standing in the kitchen when Patrick came through the garage door, and he was wide as a ghost and he got really quiet and really still and approached me and he said, "The doctor just called me and Sharon he said, it's cancer."

(gentle music) - He went around to basically every major accelerator company out there around the world to say would they be willing to take on this project?

- I told him what we needed, and at the end asked if there were any willing to take on this challenge.

And the answer was no.

There was no one.

And that was a surprise to me, and I asked why.

And the answer I got is simply the complexity of that was more than we these companies were prepared to do.

- We started at that moment to put together a game plan and that game plan really had a lot to do with researching on the web.

It had to do with buying books on prostate cancer.

And I didn't, quite frankly, I didn't like what I saw.

I did not like what I saw.

It seemed like every meeting we had with these physicians was about, you know, here are the four things that could happen.

You could be impotent, you could be incontinent, you could have an infection, or you could have strictures in your urethra and those are not anything you wanna hear if you're a guy.

- [Narrator] Dr. Slater knew that proton therapy could reduce harmful side effects for cancer patients all over the world, but could he get anyone to listen?

That's when Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois came on the scene.

- I was asked to give a lecture to the faculty at Fermilab telling them what I wanted to do and Phil Livdahl was the deputy director and he was highly supportive and he rallied his troops to join with us.

- Patrick was still in a state of shock.

He was pretty numb.

I know that he was hearing what the doctors were telling him but I don't know if it was sticking.

- I was still in denial.

I was sitting there thinking, you know, I have a great career.

I have a great health.

I can't even believe I'm sitting here talking to a physician about how to take care of my tumor.

- [Narrator] Fermilab had agreed to design and build the Proton Accelerator, but first Loma Linda University Health would have to commit $1.5 million to the project.

- We needed a vote of approval from the board of trustees.

There was still controversy within the Loma Linda community as to whether this idea would work well enough to justify taking a lot of their experimental money that might be available.

In order to go forward, there was a need for commitment of dollars, real money in sizable volume to get them to commit when there are those question marks on the part of a laboratory, for example, was not an easy decision.

- [Narrator] In February, 1986, the board took a vote that would determine the future of proton therapy.

- I was told immediately after the vote that this was a positive vote and they were ready to go.

So I immediately went back to Fermilab and told them we're ready.

And so we began.

(gentle music) It was a very stressful time.

Many felt it was too risky to go into this.

I never did feel it was too risky - Once embarked upon, it was not possible to stop.

The people who were there when the hole was filled in with concrete, that this whole thing is in down there, to shield it and to do this and to do that.

We'll never forget the huge line of cement trucks lined up for roads around to pour the concrete at just the right bulb so it could all be matured at just the right time.

- During the process, the cost was going up, up, up.

It was a shock to everybody.

We all thought at first it would cost a few million, and then many million.

It got to the point where it would've stopped the show if congressional leadership had turned it down, because they were the only ones that had the kind of money it would take to make it happen.

- Dr. Slater and his team came to Washington.

We were requesting a total amount at that period of $25 million.

After that hearing, we would eventually went to the committee session with the Senate, and got $25 million.

And it was a direct result of the brilliant presentation of Dr. Slater.

- We started serious designs in 1985, and it was shipped to Loma Linda somewhere around the end of 89.

After we had tested it, you know, exhaustively, tested the beams, tested the reliability of the components.

You had to make sure everything worked because the person's life was at the other end of this.

- There would be those who said, you're going the wrong way, this won't work.

It'll be better to do that.

It was that way continually from day one until we were up and running and proved ourselves.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] While spending time with a friend, Sharon asked a random question that may have ultimately saved Pat's life.

- Just out of curiosity, I said, "Kirsten, how did you discover naturopathic medicine?"

And she said, "My dad actually had prostate cancer a few years ago and he found out about this revolutionary alternative form of healing cancer called proton therapy, down in Southern California."

You know, tears welled up in my eyes, and I silently said, "Thank you, God."

She told me about her dad and that he has been healed.

- The very first thing she said was, "Pat, we got this.

We got this."

- I knew that ultimately this would be what Patrick's choice was when I presented it to him.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] October 7th, 2011, Pat and Sharon begin the long drive from Seattle to Southern California.

- We decided that proton therapy was the modality that I would pursue for my prostate cancer.

- The latest weapon against cancer is up and running at Loma Linda University.

Today, the medical center opened the world's first hospital-based proton therapy treatment.

- Doctors say they have a high powered proton beam that kills cancer cells without surgery and without... - [Reporter] A huge machine has taken 45 years to develop.

It allows physicians to treat cancerous tumors.

- [Reporter 1] Computer scientist, John Slater, explained using a model.

- This is the accelerator.

This accelerator, the proton beam originates from a bottle of hydrogen gas that's ionized in this device.

- Placed more precisely and conform more to the irregular shape volume to target that we're trying to reach.

- [Announcer] Dr.nSlater is in large part responsible for the machine, and the procedure.

(gentle music) - It's day one.

It's October 10th, 2011 and this is my first day of treatment.

I'd show up at the medical center and the Proton Treatment Center was on the B level.

It was a couple stories down and so I would ingest probably 20 ounces of water to make sure I had a full bladder.

And the strategy there was essentially to immobilize the prostate.

So, so if I had a full bladder that would put pressure on the prostate from one angle, I would go into a hospital gown, and then get into this pod which was essentially a fitted polymer cylinder that was molded to my back.

And after that's formed, I'm essentially in the same position every time I'm treated.

The goal being to make sure that every single time in 45 treatments, you're in exactly the same position and the proton beam can be very precisely targeted to the prostate and minimize damage to the surrounding tissue.

(gentle music) - Initially, when the patient arrives for each treatment, they're placed into what we call a pod and there are a couple x-rays that are taken to verify his position to one millimeter precision.

The gantry is rotated to the optimal beam angle that we have chosen at the time of treatment planning.

The beam is turned on.

The beam treatment time is generally only a couple minutes and then it's off.

I mean, usually doesn't feel anything during treatment.

It's like getting an x-ray or a CT scan.

You just kind of lay there, you hear the beam go on, and turn off and then you're done.

- I'd go in there and 60 seconds later I would, I'd be finished.

I'd hop up, and head back to the office, essentially which was my apartment.

So I worked full time.

My treatments fell in the afternoon, so I would be at Loma Linda in the afternoon around three o'clock.

I worked out every morning.

I tried to run every morning before work.

This proton therapy was so non-invasive, I didn't have a lot of side effects.

It didn't really affect me in any way.

So the efficacy of this thing is just incredibly good.

I just wanted, I wanted to beat this thing.

I wanted to get back.

I wanted to know that that cancer did not get the best of me, and I'm making it through this experience and I'll be better having kind of survived this and come out the other side.

(gentle music) - There is no question in my mind that there was a serious design issue in bringing this together.

It couldn't have happened without that.

In fact, as you look around, you can bring out several issues where without this or without that, it wouldn't have happened, without this individual even, it couldn't have happened.

There were individuals that could have stopped this along the way.

They had to say yes, and they did.

And then gradually, more and more people gathered behind it.

That doesn't occur because one person says, we should do it.

It's far beyond that in my opinion.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Pat's 45th and final treatment took place on December 14th, 2011.

A graduation ceremony was held to celebrate his completion of all 45 proton treatments.

Soon after he and Sharon began preparing for the drive home to Seattle, Pat left Loma Linda without any changes in his quality of life.

- I say that, you know, faith and family and friends get you through the cancer journey, but it's always nice to have an angel by your side.

And for me, that angel was Sharon, my wife Sharon, and we've been married I guess 21 years now.

And she was there when I felt like I was weak, and she helped me make good decisions and she supported me through that entire process - Our entire relationship, our entire marriage.

Patrick has been the strong one for me because I've had my own health challenges and Patrick has been there for me.

I knew that this was my moment, it was my turn to be there for him.

(gentle music) - I'm back to life as normal, as usual, but it is with a different perspective on things.

I mean, they're, I'm still working out.

I'm still competing.

I'm still trying to be the best possible leader I can be at the office.

I have a new perspective and a new appreciation for life and I think I enjoy life more and I have more gratitude for what I have.

I've had no, no side effects and so life could not be any better.

And I really do attribute that to the decision I made.

- We have a wonderful radiation research laboratory or we can do virtually any type of research from that should come translational work that we can apply in the clinic.

- We are willing to take great risk to make sure that we are on the edge of important breakthrough.

This risk has led to very, very exciting answers that says tomorrow's gonna get even better.

- [Narrator] In 1994, NASA began a long collaboration with Loma Linda, using the country's first proton treatment facility to study how to protect its astronauts from the dangers of positively charged particles in space.

NASA continues its research there today.

Clinical trials are now revealing that proton therapy is highly effective in fighting early stage breast cancer with virtually no side effects.

It's also being used to fight cancer in children.

- We've been able to successfully treat literally thousands of people.

Now there are many locations across the country where the proton therapy process is in place.

So it led to an explosion of the application of the proton theory to medical treatment across the country and around the world.

- [Narrator] 14 proton centers are now treating cancer across the United States, and with many more in operation worldwide.

Research continues to reveal more uses for proton beyond cancer treatment.

Six months after winning his own battle with cancer, Pat went on to complete an Ironman Triathlon.

- You know, life isn't about waiting for the storms to pass.

It's about learning to dance in the rain.

And I guess I would argue that that proton therapy was that opportunity for me to dance in the rain.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by Ed and Ann Zinke, Versacare, George and Joan Harding.