Oncological Emergencies — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Oncological Emergencies in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. A boy who cannot lie down
2. Getting the answer without the theatre
3. Thirsty, vague and constipated
4. What goes in first
5. A level that should have fallen
6. Burning at the drip site
7. Four kilos in five days
8. A headache that ended in a fit
9. Obstruction with a mass at the apex
10. A reaction to a drug he needs
11. A soft abdomen that worries you
12. Which of the four is most at risk
13. One arm bigger than the other
14. A white pupil in the photographs
15. Low sodium and concentrated urine
16. A pulse that fades on breathing in
17. What the sheet must say first
18. Nothing has been given yet

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Air enema reduction, Omit the drug entirely, As constipation, An arterial occlusion, Spontaneous tumour lysis.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Ask whether he can lie flat. That one question separates this from every other puffy face.
• Film, fluid, then a node under local. Anaesthesia is the last thing you reach for.
• Vague, thirsty and constipated in a child with cancer. Send a calcium before anything else.
• Fluid first, always. The drug that lowers calcium cannot work in an empty circulation.
• Never stop the rescue because the infusion has finished. The drug is still in him.
• Aspirate before you remove. That cannula is the only way any of it comes back out.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Haematology and Oncology case decks · pediatric reference values.