A 21-year-old previously healthy Caucasian female presented to the emergency department (ED) in the pre-COVID-19 era for evaluation of thrombocytopenia after a flu-like illness. The patient reported fever, cough, headache and myalgias for one week. She was on oral contraceptive pills (OCPs) for five years but discontinued one week ago. She was found to be in disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) and her hospital course was complicated by intraparenchymal hemorrhage, deep vein thrombus (DVT) in the right arm veins, bilateral pulmonary embolus (PE) and multiple splenic infarcts. An extensive workup was negative but nasopharyngeal swab came back positive for adenovirus by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Tumor lysis syndrome (TLS) is an oncologic emergency, more commonly occurring in patients with hematologic malignancies receiving cancer-directed therapy due to massive cellular breakdown. Spontaneous TLS is rare and occurs in the absence of cancer-directed therapy. Herein, we present a case of spontaneous TLS associated with squamous cell carcinoma.