Why is blood not spilling out if the surgeon is operating on for example stomach.
In: Biology
The same way a you can cut into a wall in your bathroom and likely not get water everywhere. Blood is primarily kept in bigger pipes (like what runs in your walls). The “pipes” in the skin are so small that there won’t be much “leakage” when they cut into your skin, but as others have said, surgeons know where the big pipes are and how to avoid them.
Blood isn’t just floating around in your body- it’s all contained within blood vessels. During surgery, the surgeon avoids cutting the large blood vessels. They do cut the small vessels that are everywhere, but they’re either small enough to not bleed much or they get cauterised as they go
ELI5 answer:
You are not just a bag of blood. Normally, blood is only in the blood vessels of your body which are called arteries, veins, and capillaries. Cutting one of these makes you bleed. In general its hard for the surgeon to avoid capillaries because they are everywhere but they are also very small so they only bleed small amounts. These and small veins can be cauterized (heated up and burned) or just let the bodies natural clotting mechanism take over and the bleeding will stop. For larger vessels the surgeon either uses a special kind of string to tie the vessel closed before cutting it or more likely just avoid the vessel entirely. A surgeons knowledge of anatomy helps to avoid these things but everyone is a little different which is just a small part of why surgery always has risk.
Source: I work in the OR with surgeons everyday
Brain surgeon here.
I will mention something very interesting that nobody said here (except cauterization / ligaturation etc)
When we’re doing aneurysm clipping of the carotid artery inside the skull, especially in complex big ones, it’s VERY hard not to open it up and splash our walls with blood. Sometimes we use special temporary clips that we’re putting on the carotid closer to the heart, but in some rare cases we’re doing something called adenosine-induced cardiac arrest.
In ELI5, we’re stopping the heart completely for 2-3 minutes, to deflate the aneurysm and see clearly it’s boundaries and clip it. After that, the heart starts beating and building up pressure by itself after adenosine wears off in the bloodstream.
I would like to add a question in the hopes someone can answer me: how do people not fucking die during surgery. Like your getting cut open and people are cutting the insides of you and then when you wake up, you just have a little bit of pain. How are you not in excruciating pain/dead
I think we are missing the main thing here. OP thinks the abdomen is just full of free floating blood. It’s not- all the blood is in the vessels. So- they cauterize the small vessels and avoid (hopefully) the bigs ones. Even your heart- the blood the muscle uses is tied up in vessels- your actual heart muscle can’t even use the blood in it!
Lots of answers mentioning avoiding vessels based on anatomical knowledge.having just finished my surgical rotation last semester I can tell you that’s part of it, but not the main reason
Nowadays most inscicions done during surgery are made with special machines that cauterize the wound right as you cut, whether it be with electricity, ultrasounds, vibrations, etc
Even with all the anatomical knowledge, mistakes are easy to make, and smaller vessels are absolutely everywhere, making them impossible to avoid, which would cause small amounts of bleeding, that although not life threatening obscure the surgical field and makes it more prone to mistakes
As a fun aside,In my orthopedics rotation I accompanied a hand surgeon in the removal o a ganglion (small gelatinous cyst in the wrist), and since there are so many tendons, arteries, veins, etc in that area, and even a little bit of blood can obscure the surgical field enough for you to cut something important, hand surgeons use pneumatic tourniquets that completely stop all blood flow, and then wrap tight bandages around the arm to push out all the remaining blood so that there’s as close to no blood as possible while.operating. this obviously means that they have to hurry up since it can only last like maybe 40 minutes to an hour under those.cobditions before you cause serious damage to the arm
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