How/why does the bacteria stay in one place? I do know that septicemia can happen. Is it just certain infections or will all untreated infections eventually becomes sepsis?
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Few things!
Your immune system is constantly active fighting various bacteria and viruses everyday. Bacteria will “infect” tissues by usually eating the cells in that tissue, and grow as they continue to feed. Viruses invade cells and use the cells to create more viruses, which invade neighboring cells etc.
Your body will activate its immune system in many ways to either directly kill the bacteria or kill the cells with viruses in them, in order to stop the infection. When your immune system can’t fight them, they grow and start causing symptoms. This is what we would clinically call an infection.
If the bacteria (less like viruses) seed into your blood vessels, they can now hitch a ride throughout your whole circulatory system and therefore your whole body. This is called bacteremia, or generally (if viruses/fungi etc) septicemia.
Sepsis refers to the inflammatory response to an infection, not just any infection. You can go into sepsis from lung infections (pneumonia), skin (cellulitis), bloodstream (bacteremia), urinary tract (UTIs), but it usually happens when the bacteria is in the blood. It overloads your immune system, and it goes into overdrive to try to stop the invasion.
This overdrive is complex, but it basically is trying to get blood more circulating throughout your body and into your tissues, because your blood is where your white blood cells aka your immune cells are. So, your heart rate goes fast (circulate more blood from heart), blood pressure drops (vasodilates, as to let the blood seep into tissues) etc.
Not all bacteria/viruses causes real infections, and not all infections lead to sepsis. But it just depends on how strong your immune system is (and how much bacteria/virus you were exposed to). Generally kids and older people have weak systems, so you see them getting a lot more infections. However, kids immune systems are usually still good (just naieve, as their immune system hasnt been trained well yet), so they also dont really go into sepsis as much as older adults.
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