Often you hear about someone who is injured badly, but received treatment right away by the hospital – How is it possible for him to survive the first few days, and only die later on?
I imagine that he can’t bleed out, since the hospital pumps into him all the blood that he is missing, and if a vital organ he had has gotten damaged, it would cause a death in less than a day
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It’s more complicated than that.
First off, they can bleed out under certain circumstances. If major blood vessels are damaged, they can rupture under the pressure even days later. All it takes is a change in blood pressure.
Damaged organs can kill quickly, but it can also be slow. If kidneys or a liver is damaged, it doesn’t kill instantly. It takes a while for the pollutants they filter out to build up and start causing further damage.
A lot of what doctors do is just try to buy the body time to heal, though. They slow the bleeding and give meds, but it’s up to the body to do the actual healing. Sometimes it’s just too damaged though.
What everyone else said, plus infections can occur days or even after the injury, depending on how long the wound takes to heal over.
Imagine your body as a house and the injury as an earthquake.
You can see the big cracks in the walls and get props in asap so nothing collapses, but because it’s small you miss the hairline crack in the gas pipe that opens up as the building settles slightly and the cracked insulation on the nearby wiring.
Modern medicine is effective but not magic. Spotting things that are wrong is challenging at best and a big obvious thing can mask a small subtly dangerous thing easily (eg you’ve got pain in your leg. Is that the broken femur or the blood clot forming?).
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