How do they prevent people from bleeding out dry during any major operation?
In: Biology
If big blood vessels are physically clamped off so no blood flows through them. Smaller blood vessels are cauterised so the don’t leak.
Surgeons go carefully so they do their best not to accidentally cut a blood vessel. If one does get cut by mistake they try to clamp it off as quickly as possible to reduce blood loss.
You’re not just a big balloon of blood that bursts open with a scalpel. Blood is in blood vessels. A surgeon generally avoids cutting through or injuring major blood vessels during surgery, apart from specific circumstances where cutting into those blood vessels is necessary. There’s a little bit of oozing from small vessels but this is fairly little blood loss so it’s usually not a big deal.
If there’s a lot of blood loss, we give blood transfusions.
If there is much blood loss during a procedure, blood transfusions will be used to keep the patients blood pressure & volume at an acceptable level. They will use as many pints as necessary.
Imagine peeling an orange… your hands get a bit juicy as you go through the skin but after that you see the different parts of the inside without more juice loss. If you decide to cut into a segment though then things once again get juicy so you have to take care and tie off anything leaking juice.
I just had a more involved surgery; a total hip replacement. The scar is pretty gnarly.
As far as I know, there’s no record of my blood type on file as I’ve never given it to anyone. If a blood transfusion was needed (unlikely) would they just be able to figure out what flavour right then and there?
Also, while they asked me my weight, I was never weighed. Isn’t that important for the anesthetic?
Don’t cut the big blood vessels unless necessary or clamp them down if you are. Burn the small vessels to stop bleeding. And if bleeding is inevitable, give lots of blood transfusions. Liver transplant can use as much as 40 units of blood which is somewhere between 3 – 4 humans worth of blood.
You only bleed a dangerous amount when an artery/vessel is cut. Many surgeries are so non-invasive that they never sever blood vessels.
When they do have to cut one, they just use clamps to restrict the blood flow or they cauterize the smaller ones.
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