Bloody Aggressive: A Case Report on a Fungating Breast Mass in a Paraplegic Requiring Emergency Mastectomy

Abstract

Fungating malignant lesions pose a huge deal of agony to the patients. Their management is also deemed as difficult by most physicians. This report describes a case of a 45-year-old paraplegic female with delayed presentation of a very aggressive fungating left breast mass, which was diagnosed as invasive ductal carcinoma. The uncontrollable hemorrhage had the surgeons succumb to the option of emergency mastectomy as a palliative treatment to save the life of the patient. Hence, we infer that the emergency mastectomy in a hemorrhagic fungating breast lesion can be life-saving and can be performed with little to no risk to the patient. Such a procedure, surprisingly, has never been documented in the surgical literature before.