Welcome to Emergency Medicine Cases.com. I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC Studios in Toronto.

On this month's episode number 33 on oncologic emergencies, we have with us Dr. Joel Yaffey and Dr. John Foote.

Dr. Yaffey is an emergency physician at the University Health Network in Toronto.

He's the assistant director of education in the Department of Emergency Medicine at U.H.N. and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

He's the Director of the University of Toronto's annual update in Emergency Medicine Conference in Whistler, BC.

Dr. John Foote is an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He's the program director for the CCFPEM Emergency Medicine Fellowship Program at the University of Toronto. Oncology is an ever-expanding and changing complicated specialty with

hundreds of types of neoplasms, a huge list of medications with all kinds of important side effects, which

can be overwhelming for the ED doc. Of course, we don't need to know all the details of these

huge lists, but it is important for us to be comfortable with a few key cancer-related

diagnoses. Why? Well, cancer is the second leading cause of death in North America, and people are living

longer and longer with cancer, and we're seeing an increasing use of chemotherapy and bone

marrow transplantation.

So we're taking care of more and more of these patients in the ED.

Now, some of you might be thinking that most of these patients have such a poor prognosis

to begin with that what we do in the ED doesn't really matter. However, the overall five-year survival

rate of Canadians diagnosed with cancer is more than 60% and is increasing every decade. Of course,

the patients that end up in the ED are sicker than the average cancer patient, but still, most of the cancer patients you see in the ED can have significant quality years of life,

especially if you can identify and manage their cancer-related emergency effectively.

What I'd like to do in this episode is simplify the vast territory of oncologic emergencies

into five simple presentations with a

couple of diagnoses to think about for each presentation so that you have a framework to refer to

next time you see that complicated post-chemo cancer patient. The five presentations of cancer patients

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