experimental chemotherapy

I've got a man on the ward these days who presented with a large growth
on his testes; like most people here, he waited until it got really big
and started bleeding until he came into to see us. There's a few
elements of community education that I'd really like to see emphasized,
but one of them would definitely be the idea that presenting earlier for
unexplained masses is a really good idea. Like the guy in the bed next
to him, who has a mass that's at least 8 inches across eroding through
the skin, pushing his cheek out and his ear closed. Or the guy in the
bed next to him, who's got a big fleshy mass in the back of his throat
which is gradually cutting off his windpipe.
We do have limited chemotherapy, and our reading said that this could
likely be Burkitt's lymphoma in his groin, so we decided to give
chemotherapy a go. Chemo is really specialized at home, with good
reason, as these drugs are pretty evil -- one turns you so toxic that
you have to even wipe their nose with gloves for 24 hours (that one's a
derivative of mustard gas from WWI) and when you pull them up in
syringes they are thick and have these weirdly beautiful and
deadly-looking oranges and reds, so it feels like injecting some strange
type of jello into his veins.
So I put on my gloves, and pulled up my array of orange and red-filled
syringes, and ran through with him about how he'd lose his hair. I
transferred the guy three beds down to the TB ward so he could cough
over there while we were waiting to determine if he had TB or not. So
we gave the meds, and now we wait and see if there will be any shrinkage
of the tumor. This is fairly experimental, however, because we don't
really know what we're treating (the chemo doctors at home won't treat
anything until it's been examined by a pathologist); so we weigh the
options and take our best guess. We'll see how he does.