Women with early stage breast cancer have many treatment options available. While some get a mastectomy (complete removal of the breast) with or without chemotherapy, others decide to have only the portion of the breast with cancer removed (lumpectomy). After a lumpectomy, radiation therapy is required to prevent the cancer from coming back somewhere else in that same breast.  Without radiation there is as high as a 4/10 chance the cancer will return in the same breast; but with radiation and hormone therapy that risk is less than 1 in 10. After lumpectomy & radiation about 8 in 10 women were generally happy with the way their breasts looked and felt.
Radiation treatments to the breast used to take six weeks of daily treatments to complete. While the treatments were brief, often only 15 minutes or less, many women (especially in Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary’s counties) have felt forced to get the more extensive surgery knowing that they could not afford to drive back and forth to treatment everyday for six weeks. There is now new technology that allows treatment of the area of the breast in as little as a single week. Not only is the treatment time dramatically reduced, the cosmetic outcomes are somewhat better with 9 in 10 women being happy with how their breasts look and feel after lumpectomy and partial breast radiation. To be eligible for partial breast radiation, the tumor can be no larger than 3 cm (~2 ¼ inches), there must be 7 mm (~1/2 inch) between the skin and where the tumor was removed, and the lymph nodes can not have been involved.
Partial breast radiation uses a balloon implanted by a woman’s surgeon in the same space where the cancer was removed. This balloon fills the entire void and allows the radiation oncologist to deliver a high dose of radiation to just the area of the breast that we know is at highest risk of the cancer (or pre-cancer cells) still lingering. Yes even after the tumor is completely removed and nothing is seen under the microscope, there is still a 4 out of 10 chance the cancer will return when anything less than the entire breast is removed. The balloon is only radioactive while a woman is in the radiation room.  Neither she nor the balloon are radioactive outside the treatment room. A small metal pellet is placed in the balloon during treatments and removed before leaving the office. The balloon stays in throughout the one week of treatment and is then easily collapsed and removed by either the surgeon or radiation doctor as simply at pulling a stitch. 
By just treating the area at greatest risk, the radiation doctor is able to give more radiation at a time.  This decreases the number of days a woman needs the treatments.  Likewise, since a smaller amount of the breast is getting a high dose of radiation, there is a lower chance of cosmetic changes after treatment.