The opening of a new cancer center in Brewer is making life easier for local residents who are fighting cancer and certain blood diseases, and who otherwise would have had to travel to Portland or Boston for state-of-the-art treatments. The center boasts some equipment that's the first of its kind in the state, and officials at the facility hope it will lure more doctors and researchers to the area.

Before the new Lafayette Cancer Center in Brewer opened its doors in December, many cancer patients in this part of Maine either headed south to larger hospitals, or were treated in the first floor and basement of Bangor's Eastern Maine Medical Center.

"It was a small facility -- for as small as they were they did a beautiful job servicing the patients," says 57-year-old Jamie Terrill of Dixmont, who has been battling breast cancer for three years. She's waiting in a small, sunlit cubicle in the newly-built Lafayette Center to receive radiation therapy. "And over here, wow!" she exclaims. "I haven't seen all of it yet, but it's beautiful. The lounges and the waiting area -- seeing the sun and you've got tons of little cubicles. It's a big facility."

Terrill says she's never wanted to travel out of Bangor or out of state for her treatments. She says she trusts her doctor and believes the nearby center provides the care she needs. Hospial officials say EMMC built the 123,000 square foot center at a cost of $39 million dollars for people well beyond the city limits of Bangor.

"When you look at the population of Bangor, Brewer -- roughly 35,000 -- a cancer center of this size, you couldn't support it," says Allen L'Italien, the director of the Lafayette Family Cancer Center, named after the center's biggest donors, Carla and Danny Lafayette of Hampden. "But you have to think that we're serving close to half-million people from Downeast, northern Maine. There's a cancer center in Presque Isle, but we do hemotology here also. We have many hemotologists who do blood diseases. They may not have cancer but they've got blood diseases, or they have genetic diseases that affect the production of blood or bone marrow."

Paid for with hospital dollars, donations and private financing, the facility is described as "patient-focused," with everything from a fireplace at the entrance to electronic monitoring tags to keep track of each patient's whereabouts and waiting times.

L'Italien says the goal of the center is not just to treat cancer, but also to do research into why the state has such a high incidence rate -- the highest in the country, according to some reports.

The center is also home to the Maine Institute of Human Genetics and Health, where L'Italien says researchers are studying the environmental and geographic causes of cancer by asking certain questions. "If you have high levels of arsenic in wells when you're taking bladder cancers and looking at those, is the arsenic changing the cell and how the cell metabolizes things? How the cell replicates?"

One researcher at the Lafayette Center, Dr. Thomas Openshaw, has been a medical oncologist and hematologist in Bangor for 20 years. He says the new facility and its mission mark a turnign point for medicine in the greater Bangor area. "With all the advances in oncology nowadays, and with all of the new drugs that are coming on, because of the increased understanding of what causes cancer and how to treat it, we're very much interested in bringing truly cutting-edge treatments to Bangor and to people in this part of Maine," Openshaw says.

In addition to serving patients and doing research, Openshaw says he hopes the cancer center will lure mroe physicians, particularly oncologiests, to practice in rural Maine. "I think that the new building, the new facility, has really been very encouraging to young doctors coming out of training in terms of providing the sort of environment -- both the physical environment and the intellectually challenging environment -- that I think people who are finishing training are interested in."

The center has hired five physicians in the last four months, and it boasts some innovative equipment that can't be found elsewhere in the state.

"The stereotactic radiation therapy machine has the capability to place dose in the patient at the tumor within like a millimeter of precision," says physicist Larry Hambrick, as he displays the new machine. Hambrick says the precision allows deliver of larger doses of radiation more quickly, thus reducing the number of visits the patient has to make, "and allows you to treat tumors you otherwise wouldn't be able to treat just because they are in very tight situations, or are very small and need that level of precision."

While patient Jamie Terrill has exhausted her chemotherapy treatments, she continues to come back for radiation therapy. She says that even though her diagnosis is terminal, the staff and overall spirit of the new center are uplifting. "Where it's such a big facility now, it's not so crowded and you don't see that many people. I mean, the service is real good and it's more up-to-date than the other one was, and it's warmer."

The Lafayette Family Cancer Center was designed by the Portland-based architectural firm SMRT and it's located at 33 Whiting Hill Road in Brewer.