The fact that one of the drugs administered for my chemotherapy, Cytoxan, is a derivative of mustard gas intrigues me for a couple of reasons. The obvious first is for the mere fact that something so toxic is used as a medicine. The second reason takes some explaining.

In researching my novel, The Still Voice, I spent some time boning up on the first world war, or the Great War. That sounds like a paradox as my story is set during World War II. However, one cannot study the second world war without looking at the first as the seeds of WWII were sown in the Great War. And it was the Great War that saw the first use of mustard gas.

It is commonly believed the German army was the first to use nerve gas. In fact, it was initially deployed by the French against the Germans in August 1914. Germany learned well, though, and became the first to use chemical weapons on a large scale.

Mustard gas was first used by the German army in September 1917. It took twelve hours to effect its victims and blistered their skin in big mustard-colored pocks. The eyes of those exposed became sore, and they began to vomit. The gas attacked the bronchial tubes and caused internal and external bleeding.*

So onerous was the use of poison gas that in the Geneva Gas Protocol of the Third Geneva Convention, signed in 1925, the signatory nations condemned it as uncivilized and agreed not to deploy it in future wars.

As a child growing up in Germany during WWII, my mother remembers her own mama receiving instruction in putting on a gas mask, then donning the mask to run through a gas-filled room. The Germans were that afraid, so many years later, of that type of warfare. My mother was to receive the training at a later date. It never happened. And nerve gas was not deployed as a battlefield weapon in WWII.

So how does a mustard gas derivative work as an anti-tumor drug? It is used to treat breast, ovarian, and other cancers by damaging the DNA of the cancer cells when they are in their “resting phase” (not dividing). Because Cytoxan disrupts their division, the cells die. However, since the drug cannot distinguish good cells from bad, it affects normal cells in the blood, mouth, digestive tract, and hair follicles. Cytoxan is said to have a less drastic effect on the normal cells because they “divide more slowly and are better able to fix DNA breaks than cancer cells.”**

One of my friends received the same regimen I am getting. She is a sixteen-year cancer survivor. Evidently, it works.


*Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWgermanA.htm
** http://breastcancer.about.com/od/chemotherapydrugs/p/cytoxan.htm