My husband was treated at Johns Hopkins, and generally they tried to arrange radiation in the morning and chemo in the afternon, for reasons stated above. This was not always possible, there was a lot of demand for the tomoTherapy radiation machine and I know some of the folks had to take chemo in the am and radiation in pm. Usually the powerful anti-emetics given with the chemo drugs were enought to stifle nausea that day, but residual nausea was sometimes an issue on following days --especially if the chemo drug was cisplatin.

Those taking amifostine (Ethyol) had a whole other issue to deal with, nausea was often an after-effect of the injection. Thus the need to take Zofran or similar serious anti-nausea drug 90 minutes before the amifostine injection, and hope that it worked!

My husband was not given amifostine on chemo days, and (later into treatment) Fridays as by the end of the week, fatigue coupled with lingering chemo nausea made him very vulnerable to a bad reaction to the Ethyol. He got sick a couple of times and decided to bag Fridays. It did not seem to reduce the efficacy of the amifostine, by the way, as he came through with good salivary function.

Gail

p.s. Oh, the oncology nurses all said, "use Dove soap.."