Let’s say in the case of someone losing their arm at the shoulder; How does our body rebuild?
In: Biology
Imagine a long dead end street with houses along it. Now think about how the plumbing system to those houses works. There’s a water main that runs down the street to the end of it. Coming off this water main are pipes, each of which leads to a house. Inside the house, the pipes split up and go to sinks and showers and toilets. From those places, drain pipes run down and join to sewer pipes, and each house has a sewer piper leading back to a main sewer pipe under the road. Water flows through these pipes in the sequence I just described.
Now, what happens if you “amputate” the end of the street by digging it out into a big hole? You have to cap off the end of the mains and sewer pipes to stop water from spraying out everywhere, but other than that, you don’t have to do any rerouting. Why? Because each house has its own independent supply of water from the mains. The houses in the remaining part were not at any point getting water that had flowed through the houses in the part you dug away, so to them it doesn’t matter that the rest of the street isn’t there anymore. The mains and sewer pipe weren’t connected down at the far end of the street or anything, so you don’t have to join them together.
Blood vessels work the same way. Arteries lead into your arm, they split up into smaller and smaller blood vessels going to the different parts of your arm, which split into capillaries which fill all your tissues and provide blood to your cells, then blood flows from those capillaries and back into veins and then out. Arteries never connect directly to veins, and the blood going to the upper part of your arm doesn’t travel down to the bottom of it in the first place so there’s no need to really worry about rerouting. You just have to prevent blood loss from the ends of major veins and arteries until they heal up.
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