My husband just spent 5 days in the hospital getting IV diaretics to remove fluid …lost 10 lbs. He has congestive heart failure. I know that the blood and ergo the oxygen is not flowing freely, by how does this cause fluid buildup and what IS the fluid. How is this different from fluid in lungs from pneumonia?
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This is quite a complex topic
Blood is mostly made up of water. The heart’s job is to pump blood around the body to where it needs to go. In heart failure, the heart is unable to pump blood effectively. The most common type of heart failure is Left Ventricular Heart failure (which is also known as congestive heart failure) and we can characterise that with a percentage score known as the Ejection fraction. When the heart is not pumping blood effectively, there is a backlog of blood waiting to get into the heart to be pumped. In the case of Left ventricular heart failure, that blood is sitting in the lungs waiting to be pumped.
Blood vessels are naturally leaky, they allow some water to leak out into the surrounding tissues. In your husband’s case, the backlog of blood in the lungs meant that the water in the blood started leaking into the lungs making it hard for him to breathe. Fluid in the lungs is called pulmonary odema.
There are two arms of treatment for treating heart failure. The first are medications to help the heart beat harder and stronger. The second is to try and reduce the load on the heart, by removing the amount of water it has to pump around and reducing the pressure in the system (blood pressure) that it has to pump against. To do this, we give medications that stimulate the kidney to make excess urine (we call this diuresis). By making your husband pee, we can make him dehydrated. A dehydrated person has less water to leak out into the surrounding tissue and less blood volume that needs to be pumped. An important part of his ongoing treatment will be limiting the amount of fluid he drinks. He essentially needs to remain in a state of mild dehydration. This can be a tricky balance.
There are also a complex set of hormones involved in fluid regulation, but its a little too complex for ELI5.
The fluid in pneumonia is usually infective as a result of inflammation from infection. But it too also comes from leaky blood vessels.
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