Case records of the massachusetts general hospital: Weekly Clinicopathological Exercises

Presentation of Case A 29-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital because of a pathologic fracture of the right femur. The patient had been well until 31 days earlier, when she crawled under a machine at work to connect a belt and began to have pain in the anterior portion of the right thigh, which became progressively worse. Five days later x-ray films of the thigh, obtained elsewhere, were normal. The pain persisted, and the patient began to walk on crutches. One day before admission an orthopedic consultant made a diagnosis of a “sprain.� On the next morning the patient. . .