The bump on his left ear looked innocent enough. At 33 and just two years out of surgical specialty training, craniofacial and maxillofacial surgeon Dr. Stephen Cantrell was consumed with teaching and practicing in a busy university hospital. Then came the biopsy results: the little nuisance was in fact malignant melanoma. Life changed overnight.
After the first round of surgical procedures, Cantrell enrolled in a clinical trial testing a cancer vaccine. The melanoma recurred anyway, and more surgery followed. Interferon was next but to no avail.
A year later the cancer changed into a much more aggressive form and began shooting new tumors around his neck and chest with alarming speed. Doctors then advised that his condition would deteriorate rapidly and he probably had about six weeks left to live. "They told me to find a nice beach somewhere and enjoy a few sunsets," Cantrell remembered. "I said no. I worked with some great surgeons, and they were willing to get me on the table the next day whenever a new metastasis popped up."
The surgeries to fight the new metastases were frequent. "Those were dark days," he continued. "I was getting my neck or chest sliced open sometimes every two or three weeks. At one point I had to stick a large needle in my own neck twice a day to drain the fluid buildup." It still wasn't enough.
In July 2000 he underwent yet another selective neck dissection, but two weeks later there were new tumors deeper in the neck. "I had access to some of the most prominent doctors in the field," Cantrell explained, "but there really wasn't anything else they could offer. At that point, nothing works." Realizing he was out of treatment options, he knew he would have to step into the unknown to fight any further.
He went back to the medical literature, searching for any reasonable thing that was too new to have been fully tested or perhaps had been overlooked. There was nothing. Finally, he took an educated guess that a combination of lovastatin and interferon might have a shot at working.
He was criticized sharply by most of his doctors; they urged him to quit making his own treatment decisions and go with the standard drugs, even though they held no real potential. Instead Cantrell decided that his only hope was to do something he would never ask of anyone else: experiment on himself with a completely untested treatment. "At that point there was nothing to lose," he explained. "As it stood I was going to be dead very soon, so any potential at all made it a risk worth taking." He continued keeping careful notes and became the guinea pig for the new technique.
Not even he was prepared for what happened next. After four weeks of the new combination, scans showed no remaining evidence of cancer. The radiologist assumed that the neck metastases had been surgically removed; their disappearance with a simple drug regimen was unthinkable. "I don't know what you did," he said, "but you're clean."