So when someone is donating plasma, What is that?
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Ha I assumed you meant physics. But I’m a nurse so maybe can explain after all. Stay with me here. Think about what blood is. Like really what is blood?? It’s life right? If you run out you die but what is it?? Why do we need it ?? It seems like a huge weakness that if someone pokes a hole in you , you spring a leak and then die. The truth is, we are engines that burn fuel and air just like a car engine and produce a ton of exhaust. Every microscopic part of you needs oxygen and fuel and a way to dump C02 out. So how exactly do you get fuel and air to for example your left toenail? Blood. Trillions of tiny little pipes carry blood to every remote corner of the body. Now at first you might think the best way to do this is with like air. Air in, exhaust out. And in fact that’s how insects work. But if you have ever looked around, insects don’t get very big. It turns out air isn’t the easiest thing to pump through tiny pipes. Plus it doesn’t carry the fuel. So now you need fuel lines ? I mean my car has separate fuel lines and air lines. But there isn’t really room for separate fuel and air lines everywhere in your body plus a separate fuel pump and air pump ?? Too complicated. So we have combined fuel and air via the blood. Now if our blood was just liquid it would work. It could carry some oxygen and sugar and all the other stuff we need. That’s plasma. It’s the fluid pumping through your heart and through your veins. It also takes wastes away. For some complicated reasons there’s a lot of protein in the liquid. It keeps up the concentration of the blood so to speak without being too salty. It keeps water “in the blood”‘instead of leaking out . Plus there’s a bunch of other interesting proteins to help with those leaks I mentioned and also your immune system is riding along because the blood highway is a very efficient way to get to every corner of the body. So plasma is mostly protein and water by weight. Some of those proteins are really really valuable and even life saving. So valuable they will pay you $40 for a kilo. Now I’ve skipped right over the other stuff that makes blood blood. Like say the blood cells. The things that makes blood red instead of pale yellow. I mean why do we have blood cells ?? Cells are things , chunks. The worst thing possible to pump is chunks. And they are alive and then they die and you have to clean up the mess… it’s a whole thing. Oxygen dissolves in plasma actually so why isn’t blood just pure liquid? Well plasma it turns out doesn’t carry much oxygen. We need a lot of oxygen. Especially our brains. And we could have oxygen carrying proteins in our blood. Hemoglobin is the protein famous for carrying oxygen and we could have loose hemoglobin in our plasma. After all plasma is filled with proteins. Well … it turns out that if that much hemoglobin was in the plasma , it would be like syrup and it wouldn’t pump! So the red blood cells carry super concentrated syrup in the very thin runny plasma. It’s a great compromise. Sadly it does mean that the smallest blood vessels can’t be any smaller then a red blood cell. They even ditch their nucleus (which is a death sentence) to shrink down as small as possible.
Anyway tl:dr plasma is the runny fluid in your veins that allows your heart to still pump. You can donate a ton of it because it doesn’t carry oxygen and your body can just dump water in to replace it. It’s mostly water, salt and protein
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