Is it safe to be intimate with your partner who is on chemo and radiation?

Is it safe for an individual to be intimate with their partner who is on chemo and radiation? What sort of precautions should they take while being with their partner? So the question is intimacy with chemo and radiation for patients. You know, I always mentioned that when I was in med school over 30 years ago, there was this class, is it cancer and can I still have sex? The two questions that patients have but were afraid to ask. And I think in medicine, we don't do enough of a job of allowing people to ask that question and being proactive about it. Our nurses are probably better at it. I think physicians just go in and out and the patients are like chatting with the nurses and a big believer in nursing-driven education and patient care. But sex is an important part of life. I think patients should feel comfortable being intimate. I think with radiation, absolutely no problem. The main issue there is depending on where they're getting radiated, they may have some irritation of that body part. So depending on if it's in the pelvic area, that might be a complication. Might want to wait for the healing to complete. For chemo, I think generally the amount of drug that would pass through to the body secretions is pretty minimal. So I don't think there's a risk per se for the other person, the partner. The one exception, of course, is which is a huge deal and every myeloma patient loves doing their surveys, but it's the imid drugs. And it goes back to the thalidomide in the 60s and 70s, which was given to women as a sedative and caused birth defects. So now we think that the whole class of drugs has that issue. So any couple who is of childbearing years, where the female is of childbearing years, really should use double methods to prevent getting pregnancy for that reason. And so that could be whatever two forms of contraception because it's just really important to try to adhere to that guideline. So this is a very complicated question. And the short answer is always discuss with your health care team as far as what specific treatment you're getting and what activities are going to be somewhat problematic, maybe a little problematic or prohibited. Really, the biggest one that we talk about is people who are on imid drugs like thalidomide, pomelist and Revlimid, because those compounds will be found in semen, we know that there is an ability for the male patient to pass the slow doses of the drug to their female partner or male partner. And the reality is we typically recommend barrier protection for things like that. But for specific chemo and radiation, every drug has different half-lives, different types of excretion. So this is, unfortunately, the core of this. This is a very personal question to ask your care team anytime you change treatment.