Tuesday's final exam includes about 50 chemotherapy drugs and other immune system suppressors (like what they give you if you've had a transplant of some kind). The real bitch of it all is that courtesy of the midterm I know the style of questions this professor enjoys (it's suitable to note here that I enjoy that he wears argyle sweater vests every day):
"You are treating a patient for Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (OK that cuts it down to about 50 drugs) when she presents to the ER with hemorrhagic cystitis (OK, now we're down to 1; PS: hemorrhagic cystitis is basically a bleeding bladder). What is the mechanism of the drug that the staff forgot to administer prophylactically to prevent the hemorrhagic cystitis?"
Oh, bastard!
See, once they mention the cystitis, you're thinking, "Oh, I got this. Cyclophosphamide." But the question isn't about cyclophosphamide. It's about mesna. But not just what mesna is used for, how it works. So, really, you go through 3 distractor questions before you get to the real one. And then you better hope you remembered to memorize the mechanism of the mesna. Something about thiol-forming compounds...I don't know.
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