Radiotherapy: Way Cooler Than I Thought

I just learned that the contraption delivering radiation therapy to my breast is actually a linear particle accelerator! Being a non-scientist, I'd only heard of particle accelerators in relation to particle physics and colliders, such as the two mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator or the Large Hadron Collider currently under construction in Switzerland. This is what my machine looks like:

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But research accelerators are used for other purposes. When particles collide, cool things can happen like this:
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The Large Hadron Collider is planned to be switched on in May 2008 and is hoped to do entertaining things such as producing the Higgs boson particle (aka the God Particle), with possible theoretical minor safety concerns such as creating mini black holes within the Earth or destroying the universe.

Now you know why my eyes boinged out of my head in a "how sci-fi is that!" kind of way when I learned just this morning that I've been the target of linear particle accelerator beams every day. You can see in the picture that the machine is designed to tilt, actually in a whole bunch of planes from what I can tell. I'm not allowed to watch it move around my body because I'm carefully aligned using green laser beams and required to remain still. Up to now I've just been treated with photon beams, but today I've graduated to electron beams! Electron beams don't travel very far, so there's an extension thingy that goes right up to, but not touching my skin.

I feel like I'm living in the future!

Disclaimer: I am not a scientist and I have no idea what I'm talking about. A couple engineers and at least one physicist are friends of mine who read this blog, and they'll recognize immediately that I'm talking through my hat. Any corrections and/or illumination would be welcome in the Comments.