This afternoon I’ll get my 7th dose of 1.8 Gy of x-rays on the way to 54 Gy. The machine doing the deed is a Varian IMRT. It is a very impressive bit of technology. It has a continuously variable aperture and intensity. The rad tech opened the access panels up for me yesterday and showed me the innards. There is a rather large microwave generator inside with waveguides piping energy … somewhere. She said this TrueBeam system could also do electron beam therapy. The machine has a built-in CT scanner to verify that the sorry sod strapped in is aligned properly.
Last Monday I officially became a ligand for platinum. Got the first dose of cis-platin. Somewhere I have molecules- DNA- that are ligated as Pt complexes. The first dose hasn’t been much of an issue. The anti-nausea meds definitely have side effects though.
Five more weeks and 5 more cis-platin doses to go. Week one was without serious side effects thanks to Dulcolax.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Thank you for sharing your insight and experiences.
Phil R.
now its probably a good time to learn how to make cannabis brownies. 54 Gy. And 0.015 curies of hard gamma in your system – that should be good enough to expose film in a camera, located in another room.
I like the brownie idea. Unfortunately, my employer has no exemption for cancer in the random arrival of the piss wagon.
well, the later rounds of chemo tend to be more severe. So if you are in a state that does not legalize medical cannabis, you can ask your doctor for a prescription of Marinol, which is a medical-grade pure THC, and it is approved to treat nausea. It does not work nearly as well as brownies, but the metabolites in the urine are exactly the same so you would provide a perfect excuse for your employer.
Also if you are on cis-platinum, you may want to be on lookout for early signs of nephrotoxicity. To make it easier on your kidneys, keep well hydrated and cut down on salt intake. By the way, sea salt works great for low-sodium cooking – magnesium trace in sea salt is quite good at fooling the taste buds into thinking that the food is salty enough
Yes, you are a ligand – unfortunately you are not very reproducible. Also, I believe the vast majority of the platinum ends up in proteins with free -SH’s to grab that white gold.
Hang tight friend – I’m sure this roller coaster will pick up speed soon enough.
How interesting. I hadn’t considered that Pt was very thiophillic. Sp?. Thanks!!
Its isn’t very thiophilic with regards to endogenous thiols compared to DNA binding at therapeutic levels of CisPlatin. Have a look at the following paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11792689
apparently they wanted to know if someone was taking a therapeutic drug containing a thiol, what its effect on CisPlatin therapy would be. In the case of your therapy I would say more DNA binding was likely taking place than shunting aside by thiol binding.