What are the symptoms of mastitis?

Suffering from mastitis will have a lot of impact on women, so it is necessary to detect it in time and take timely treatment measures. Common symptoms are milk congestion, and the lump stage will be accompanied by redness, swelling, distension, tenderness, and some patients will also have sudden high fever and chills or symptoms of suppuration and ulceration.

Stage 1: milk stasis and lump stage or redness and swelling stage. The main symptom is sudden swelling, hardness, and pain in a certain part of the breast, usually the upper outer or upper inner quadrant, with unclear boundaries and obvious tenderness. At this stage, the inflammation inside the breast is at the cellulitis stage and no abscess has yet formed. The color of the breast skin is normal, slightly red, or slightly warm. Sudden high fever, chills, pain, swelling, local bright redness, which quickly turns to pus and ruptures, often accompanied by chest tightness, headache, loss of appetite, etc.

Stage 2: abscess formation stage. If the cellulitis stage fails to dissipate in time, the inflammation will continue to develop, tissue necrosis, and abscess formation are inevitable. The lump gradually grows larger and harder, and the pain becomes more severe, often throbbing or even persistent, and the local skin of the breast becomes red and burning. The patient has a persistent high fever, thirst, nausea and anorexia, and swollen lymph nodes in the ipsilateral axillary.

Stage three: late stage of abscess ulceration. When an abscess matures, it may rupture on its own or be drained surgically. If the drainage is unobstructed, the local swelling and pain will be reduced, the body temperature will return to normal, and after changing the dressing, the wound will gradually heal in about a month. If the pus does not drain smoothly after ulceration, the swelling does not go away, the pain does not decrease, and the fever does not subside, it means that the drainage is not smooth. If it is not healed for a long time, it will turn into chronic mastitis and form a milk fistula, that is, milk and pus will flow out mixedly.