BREAST CANCER

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 A Case [Of] In A MAN by Dr Chibuike Joseph  Chukwudum


This 70 year old man, known smoker and alcoholic, walked into the clinic, Tuesday, with the son.
The air immediately became saturated with a nauseating stench. A left breast pocket completely soaked with blood gave a clue as to where  the stench was coming from.
Instinctively, I knew what it was. Rare, but not impossible. “Never say never,” is the maxim in medicine.
So I wasn’t surprised when he opened his shirt and I saw a right breast mass, about the size of  a golf ball, with an actively bleeding, fungating lesion on the overlying skin.
A huge swelling, about the size of a table tennis ball, in the axilla[armpit], showed it had already started spreading. The skin ulceration makes it a STAGE 3 malignancy.
He had had the mass for quite sometime– 5 years, he said; but because it wasn’t really disturbing him, he didn’t pay any special attention to it. Then about three weeks prior, it had started paining him, raising some concern. It subsequently ulcerated, and then started bleeding that morning.
You can imagine their shock when I told them he had BREAST CANCER, and that if they had gone to an “Ortwer,” a theatre attendant, like they were planning to, for “removal” of the mass, it would have given more room for distant metastasis, and he would have died faster.
Most importantly,there won’t be any tissue left that would be used for a histological diagnosis, without which cancer chemotherapy would just be as good as nothing.

📝 POINTS TO NOTE
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 🔕 Males, just like women, have breast tissue, which even though rudimentary, can still undergo malignant changes.
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 🔕 Bearing this in mind then, breast cancer awareness should not be for women alone; men are also advised to be proactive in their vigilance against breast cancer, including at least quarterly carrying out of BSEs [Breast Self Exams]
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🔕 Risk factors in males include:
Alcoholism

Smoking

Obesity

Gynaecomastia

Liver disease

Aging

Testicular problems

Estrogen therapy

Etc.
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 🔕 Any mass anywhere in the body that lasts longer than a month, should be taken seriously. A visit to the hospital would tell if it is anything to worry about or not.
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 🔕 Removing a mass, no matter how small, without subjecting it to histological analysis, is as good as signing one’s death warrant.
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NB: Clinical pictures were taken with patient’s FULL CONSENT, and the purpose was dully explained to him.

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