It's the smell that hits you first. Even before I saw the patient, the foul mell of rotting flesh warned me. "Yet another who may have left it too late,"I told myself.
The patient was a woman in her early 30s who worked as a fi nancial consultant. She had fainted at the airport because of severe anaemia. As it turned out, she had been bleeding continuously from a large fungating mass for several months.
The tumour, about the size of a large orange, had broken through the surface of her skin and had become infected. She packed it with pressure bandages to slow the blood loss and used lots of perfume to mask the smell.
Read more >> |
