Contest: Spleen Disease "Spontaneous Spleen Rupture"

Hello my dear Steemians,

Here I wanted to leave a link to the contest by @afzalqamar

https://steemit.com/healthy-steem/@afzalqamar/contest-alert-spleen-disease

Spleen disease: what do you know about them?

When I saw the name of this contest I wanted to share my story from my recent case that I came across during my work. Spleen is one of the organ that takes part in building of blood cells but also destroying old blood cells that is why another name of spleen is “Cemetery of blood cells”. That is why usually people with spleen disease will be investigated and treated by Haematologists, or Blood Doctors.

As surgeons we only involved if there is a spleen rupture and of course that will cause bleeding. So one day we were called to Emergency department to patient with left sided upper abdominal pain and this is a place of Spleen, the patient also was pale and dropping his Blood Pressure, his heart started to race. That is always a sign of acute bleeding and of course the fist impression, likely Spleen Rupture.

Spontaneous Spleen rupture

This terminology Spontaneous Spleen Rupture is something that always make us, surgeons alert. Normal size spleen usually can not rupture spontaneously but only after trauma and some external force. If it happened spontaneously that means that spleen was not healthy and already large size, that only happens if there are any diseases, in our case it was white blood cancer and size of the spleen of patient was five times larger then normal one.

The investigations usually blood test that will show that the patient is loosing red cells, also one of the important scan is CT scan.

The treatment is to try to stop bleeding and treatment of choice nowadays is endovascular treatment with metal coils made from platinum and look like fine spiral metal that is placed to block the lumen of artery and stop bleeding. The procedure is preferable because it is spleen preserving procedure.

If that is not successful the next step is surgery, emergency operation with ligation of vessels and removal of spleen.

In our case, we had to take spleen out, patient recovered well, the investigation of splenic tissue showed that it was indeed cancer of white blood cells.

Nowadays, luckily many blood cancer has good prognosis of treatment and so our patient.

Hope that was interesting for you to learn more about spleen.

I am inviting @theexplorerguy, @vvarishayy, @pathanapsana