Why's she supposed to stay away?

So i won't get too high a dose of radiation. Interestingly they said people over 45 only need to stay three feet away from her. I guess on the theory that the older you are the less time whatever dose of radiation you get will have to do any harm, or something like that?

Yeah, pretty much.

Dr Steve

It just seems like if you're supposed to stay that far away from her for that long, the rads from that level of contamination in/on the cat will surely kill her rapidly.

Well the gap between the amount of radiation that can potentially cause problems and the amount of radiation that will kill you later is pretty huge. I'm sure this treatment has increased her chance of getting cancer later in life by a measurable amount. However that's better than leaving a serious medical problem untreated _now_. But even after you've decided a modest increase in cancer risk is a reasonable price to pay to treat the current issue, there's no good reason to increase the cancer risk of everyone else around her as well.

They make the same decision all the time with humans. Cancer treatments _can_ cause another kind of cancer later in life, but it's relatively rare, and getting rid of the cancer _now_ is more important. I think they may slide the scale a bit for cats in terms of what medical condition now is worth causing a cancer risk later because even the oldest cats don't live much past 20, so there just isn't that much time for any mutations to have much effect.

Of course i am not a doctor, so this is mostly just guesswork :)

Or this might turn into an awesome superhero backstory.

Yay! I was wondering how long until someone was going to make that joke! :)