A fellow physician called me with a consult this afternoon.
He described the case as a 60 year old who had stridor (difficulty breathing) for the past week and was admitted to the hospital recently. A CT scan showed lymph nodes in his neck which was compressing the trachea, and other scans didn’t show much better. A biopsy was done but the final results were pending. It was cancer. It smelled like cancer, it looked like cancer per his description, and in my gut I knew it was.