I understand the blood is going places its “not supposed to be” but its still on the inside so whats the deal?
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In addition to the answers you already have about reabsorption, this can be a simple or complex physiological process.
Let’s say you hit your arm hard. You break some small vessels, they eventually clot and stop bleeding, the blood settles into the cellulite and between tissue layers, and the squashed muscle, creates a hematoma (bruise) an sits. Your body comes along, special cells clean up the debris, absorb the water, put it back into your blood stream or lymph system, and it’s fixed.
But, let’s say you hit your head really hard and have an arterial bleed aka internal bleeding inside your skull. The arteries carrying that blood are under blood pressure, so the blood is pumping out into the space between your skull and brain, squishing your brain just as if someone was physically leaning on it with their elbow. Good?
Or, say you rupture one of the major veins in the abdomen, the hepatic vein, perhaps. That vessel is big enough to slowly leak half your total blood volume or more, blowing your belly up like a tight water-balloon. Now you don’t have enough blood to carry oxygen everywhere else in the body and all your organs are being moved and compacted by the blood. Your heart now has more resistance to pump against because the aorta is squashed. Your lungs are crushed upward, so your breathing becomes shallow. Most of all, whatever caused the bleeding is still happening.
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Eventually it does get reabsorbed, but that happens slowly (it’s how bruises heal).
The bigger problem with internal bleeding is that if blood is going where it shouldn’t be, it means it’s not going where it should be, and it’s leaving the circulatory system, so you get the same problem as bleeding out: there’s less and less blood circulating.
Sure it can, eventually… But in the meantime, it’s not going where it’s supposed to be.
The circulatory system isn’t like an engine where oil collects in the sump and is picked up from a pool at the bottom – it’s a closed system like an AC unit and pipes lose pressure the whole thing stops working
To take some very simplistic examples:
No blood in the muscles? Can’t use those… No blood in the lungs? looks like you’re not getting any oxygen or getting rid of any CO2. No blood in the brain? Doesn’t take long to damage it permanently or fatally.
Blood vessels keep blood in by making it hard for blood to pass through the vessel walls and get out. As a side effect, blood can’t easily get back in either.
The problem with internal bleeding is that if blood leaves the blood vessels, it isn’t going where it needs to go.
ETA: your brain uses a lot of oxygen, which it gets from your blood. If you bleed into your chest cavity, that’s less blood that can go to your brain. It’s the same case with all your organs and a bunch of other stuff your blood carries.
Problem is reabsorption, even if possible, takes a long time.
You need the blood this moment.
>I understand the blood is going places its “not supposed to be”
You already have your answer lol. Its not supposed to go anywhere else and so it’s a problem.
The circulatory system is like your bodies highway system. Red Blood Cells the transport trucks. Imagine damage to your blood vessels like a terrible blizzard during an earthquake. An overpass collapses and transport trucks and cars go careening off onto the streets below. The wreckage immense, doing damage to the other streets, any cars or buildings in the area, and the clean up (or re-absorption as you put it) takes weeks. The city (your body) impaired and forced to redirect traffic the entire time, and most of the wreckage is essentially useless. The goods being transported in the trucks never reached the destination they were meant for, there are less cars and trucks overall to do the tranportation work, and anything reabsorbed is at best recycled.
Blood is a connective tissue connecting nutrients, oxygen, etc from the organ of origin to the organ in need. Like roads in a city. Internal bleeding is like a city scraping up all its blacktop and paving the business district. Suddenly it isn’t where it is useful and now nothing is getting where it needs to go
Imagine a water pipe burst inside your house, the water is still delivered inside your house, but it is kind of a big deal it’s going to where it’s not supposed to be.
Same with blood – it’s supposed to stay inside the pipes running through the body, not just generally inside the body.
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