Our Chemo nurse recommended eating before chemo, but not within the two hours immediately leading up to receiving the drug. However with some drugs (cisplatin being one) the drug and hydration infusions take a long time and it is important to try to keep something in your stomach. Ask your nurse for what they recommend for the particular drug John will be getting.

One warning -- don't eat or drink anything that you really like just before chemo, because if you get severely nauseated from the drug your mind will associate the illness with the food and you may no longer be able to abide it! This is the infamous "Sauce Bernaise Syndrome" -- a famous psychologist got very ill right after a meal containing this sauce and even though this later proved to be a stomach flu (which almost everyone in his office caught) he was unable to tolerate even the thought of Sauce Bernaise for years afterwards! This reaction is apparently instinctive -- to help us avoid poisonous food items -- and occurs in most animals. Anyway, the psychologist wrote a paper about this and coined the name...

On another note, Erbitux and Tarceva are both being given at a number of institutions throughout the country in clinical trial settings, sometimes as an initial therapy (usually combined with other chemo drugs and radiation). It would not hurt to ask if a trial were available where John is being treated. Patients at Hopkins in the Tarceva trial seemed to be responding quite well, some had pretty advanced disease. Of course final results are not in yet, nor any long-term followup...

Gail