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Chances are you’ll never need it, but if you do, you can get it right here in Baton Rouge.

“It” is a treatment for rare eye cancer called choroidal melanoma, in which low-dose radiation is applied to the affected area in an ingenious way: Radioactive “seeds” about 3 millimeters long are placed inside a solid gold cap—or plaque—that is attached to the eyeball. The gold backing keeps the radiation from penetrating where it’s not supposed to go, such as the brain.

The treatment can be a lifesaver for people afflicted with choroidal melanoma, of which roughly 2,000 new cases are diagnosed in the United States every year. The disease primarily strikes older, fair-skinned Caucasians with blue eyes, though level of sun exposure doesn’t seem to be a factor.

That’s according to Dr. John Gibbons, chief of clinical physics with Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, which partnered with Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center to offer the treatment as part of a joint cancer program.

“The ratio of white to non-white victims is 9-to-1, so it’s pretty high,” he says.

Dr. Jeff Fuller, an ocular oncologist with OLOL and another member of the eye plaque team, says that, although rare, choroidal melanoma is one of the most common among a wide variety of ocular tumors.

“This is one of the only life-threatening tumors,” he says. “We do the treatment not just to try help preserve their eye and their vision as much as possible, but to save their lives as well.”

Fuller’s job is to insert and remove the plaque containing the radioactive seeds, which are the same seeds used in much greater quantities to treat things like prostate cancer. Gibbons determines the dosage and prepares the tiny radioactive package, which stays attached to the eye—the back of the eye usually—from five to nine days.

Dr. Kenneth Lo, a radiation oncologist with Mary Bird Perkins, completes the team. He consults with patients about the procedure, fine tunes the dosage and makes sure the tumor hasn’t metastasized. Unfortunately, when that happens, there’s only a 10% chance the patient will live for five more years.

Before the procedure was invented, about two decades ago, anyone with choroidal melanoma was guaranteed to lose the eye. The treatment was available in New Orleans before Katrina, though now the Mary Bird Perkins program is the only place to get it done in Louisiana—a fact they like to tout because it’s yet another weapon in their cancer-fighting arsenal, albeit a rarely used one.

Fuller says the procedure usually costs between $22,000 and $30,000. Fuller receives about $1,500 of that to perform the surgery, dictated by Medicare’s physician reimbursement schedule. The rest of the cost comes from the cost of anesthesia and radiation oncology services. The radioactive seeds themselves are also very expensive—from $100 to perhaps a few hundred dollars per seed.

“You figure you pay that much you’d get to keep them, but we take them back,” Gibbons says.

OLOL and Mary Bird Perkins began offering the procedure not long after Fuller relocated to Baton Rouge from Iowa last year, joined a medical practice and through OLOL teamed up with Gibbons and Lo. Gibbons had already set up an eye plaque program in South Carolina, so he knew how to make it happen on Mary Bird Perkins’ end.

“It’s a good thing to offer the service for the patients,” Fuller says. “I think there’s probably a benefit from a marketing or bragging rights standpoint. That was one of the reasons my partner [Dr. John Couvillion] really wanted to get me here. He knew no one did this in the state, and this was something we could add to the practice.”

Gibbons says the best thing is that patients don’t have to travel.

“The big plus is that people don’t have to go outside,” he says. “They can stay in Louisiana.”

That was a big deal for Linda Holmes, the team’s first—and only—patient so far. She doesn’t fit the typical victim’s profile in that she has brown eyes—not blue—and isn’t particularly fair-skinned. But Holmes, who lives in Baton Rouge, learned she had choroidal melanoma after seeing an ophthalmologist for vision problems. The news came as a shock. She’d had family members who had died of skin melanoma, but nothing involving the eye.

The doctor referred her to Fuller, who had just arrived and didn’t have all his medical equipment. He told Holmes she’d have to go to Tennessee or Georgia for treatment, though she was having none of it.

“I said, ‘I’ll wait on you if you just promise to treat me like your own mother,’” Holmes says.

Part of it was her confidence in Fuller. Part of it was her dislike of traveling. The idea of five nights in a motel room was extremely unappealing, especially because it’s difficult to leave her dog, which has medical problems.

Not only would Holmes have had to travel out of state for the initial treatment, but also for the frequent, required follow-up visits. As it is, Holmes’ treatment was a success; the tumor is shrinking, and she doesn’t have to leave town.

The vision in that eye improves a little each day, though the remnants of the tumor will always block her “dead center” vision in the eye to some extent. Mainly, Holmes is just glad the tumor is dead and she gets to keep her eye. As for Fuller’s arrival in Baton Rouge around the same time she found learned about the melanoma, Holmes is convinced it was more than just a coincidence.

“I feel like God sent him here for me,” she says. “He could have gone anywhere in the United States he wanted to go. I just felt like he was sent here for me.”