I’m watching last season’s CSI finale, and someone just got shot. The person was wearing kevlar, and got shot right to the side of it. As he laid there, blood trickled out of his mouth.
Maybe I’m just dense, but I asked my roommate too and she has no idea. When you get shot or something, how does the blood get to your mouth? I don’t know much about specific anatomy and body workings. And also, why does it come out the ears sometimes? Broken eardrums? Brain trauma?
If there’s internal trauma, there’s internal bleeding. And if there’s bleeding, the blood is going to come out somewhere. Which leaves two orifices - one of which can be shown on network television.
A bullet to the lung could have a person coughing up bright red frothy blood.
Blood trickling out of the mouth is an traditional cinema leitmotif/meme for a mortal wound. I am sure it goes back to the days of movie censorship. In the “good old days” you couldn’t show blood gushing out of wounds, and so forth. Moreover, a fatal wound might not show all that much blood.
The reasons for using the mouth are that:
[ol]
[li]The victim can say his or her famous/infamous last lines as he or she dies, and you see their face[/li][li]It only has to be a trickle coming out of the corner of the mouth, visible against bare skin and not expected there[/li][li]It makes a certain amount of forensic/physiological sense. If you are shot in the lungs, stomach, throat, or other severe wound, you are going to start coughing up blood. A lung wound is particularly dangerous. None of these are necessarily fatal, but they are bad. Blood in the lungs, in particular, compromises your ability to breathe. That leads to shock and death pretty quickly.[/li][/ol]
Similarly, blood coming out of the ears indicates a brain or spinal cord injury.
In summary, blood in lungs -> mortal wound -> blood coming from the mouth -> audience realizes that this person is dead. A classic instance that immediately comes to mind is Robert Redford’s character in the movie The Sting. In the climax, Paul Newman “shoots” Redford, who then falls to the floor with “blood” coming out of his mouth. Watching carefully, you remember that Redford put a capsule in his mouth; when he gets up after being “shot” you see that this, too, was a con.
IMHO, it’s useful as cinematic shorthand, but not very realistic. Modern movies and TV shows are starting to show the reality of a dangerous or mortal wound. The victim is extremely pale and sweaty, drifts in and out of consciousness, exhibits anxiety and thirst, low blood pressure, no pulse, etc. Of course, reality is also that a fatal bullet wound can kill you in about 10 seconds. You get hit, you fall down, and by the time someone gets to you, you’re dead.
And thats how one smart secret service agent noticed and saved former President reagan’s life; by realizing it was more serious than had been thought and diverting to a closer hospital.
Not to hijack but why are bulletwounds to the lungs so critical? I would assume since you have two, you have a certain degree of lifespan left using just one, maybe days, maybe hours. Is that guess wrong? Does the drop of in blood pressure in the area make the other lung less useful? I mean I dont’ think I’ve heard of anybody outright dying from a collapsed lung that’s due to blunt trauma, how are bullet wounds different in that regard? Or have I heard wrong?
I’m sure the doper doctors can explain this much better, but what I remember from my first aid is that, although you do have two lung wings, they are both in the same cavern, propped up because there’s underpressure in there. As soon as you make a hole in that cavity, air rushes, pressure normalizes, lungs collapse - very bad. (That’s why you should try to seal a hole in that area with plastic bag and duct tape, and not with normal gauze, so it’s airtight.)
Ah. Treating the sucking chest wound. As if there were any other kind.
As others have pointed out, it’s usually from a damaged lung. Blood starts to fill the lung, your reflex is to cough to remove the fluid and suddenly you mouth of full of blood. Very graphic and makes for excellent cinema.
Usually ruptured eardrum or simply damage to the ear canal. Blood from the ears can also be a sign of a fractured skull, with the blood form the break draining into the ear canal.
The real bad sign is clear fluid leaking from the ears, which can be a sign that the lining of the brain itself has been ruptured and the fluid the brain ‘floats’ in is leaking out.
Two very different scenarios.
To start with you need to realise that the lungs basically just hang inside the chest cavity. The lungs are only stuck to the side of the chest by water tension, they aren’t physically anchored. In simplified form they are like a garbage bag inside a bin. If you imagine wetting the inside of a bin and then inserting the bag, the surface tension would cause the bag to stick to the sides of the bin, but not very strongly.
A collapsed lung from blunt trauma just means that the lung has been torn away from the chest wall. That leaves a big dead air spot between the lung and the wall. This sort of collapsed lung hurts like hell and can be fatal if left untreated but it’s not as serious because there is still only one way air can get into the chest cavity (through the throat/trachea). That means that the lungs work at an impaired level but they do still work because you can still draw air into them. Imagine you get your garbage bag and pull a few inches of it out form the bin. It reduces the volume of the bin a bit, but not significantly.
A collapsed lung from a bullet wound is a whole other story. Now we have two entry points for air to enter the chest: the trachea and the bullet hole. That means we lose the ability to draw air into the lung. When we breathe in instead of air rushing down the throat and filling the lungs it rushes into the hole and fills the cavity behind the lung. To return to our garbage bag analogy, imagine drilling a hole in the bottom of the bin and blowing air through it. It would very soon blow the bag out the top of the bin. That is essentially what happens with an open chest wound. The lung won’t actually blow out your throat but so much air will get sucked in between the lung and the chest wall that the lung totally collapses and ends up scrunched up near the top of the chest. That lung is now useless. Adding to your woes because air is being drawn into the hole as well as down the throat the other lung is also operating at reduced efficiency even if it isn’t being directly affected by the air in there.
In these situations people can die within minutes because they just can’t get enough oxygen. As constanze points out, the initial treatment it to plug the hole airtight so no more air gets drawn through. If you know what your; doing you can try to construct a simple three sided valve so the air starts getting pushed out again. With a little little the lung then partially re-inflates.
Except that the girl I saw get hit by a car had blood come out of her mouth and then died of head trama. It does happen.
On the subject of brain fluid I remember hearing a tale of a woman who went to the doctor’s complaining of a persistently running nose only to discover that the fluid was actually the fluid her brain was marinating in. I can’t find a cite for the story but I believe the woman lived.
The superficial kind that didn’t penetrate the chest cavity, and is merely bleeding some?
Who the heck would watch a movie about that?
Sheesh.
Tris
The thing to remember is the “trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth” gag is very easy to perform. Just give the actor a capsule of fake blood, they give their last words, bite down on the capsule, blood trickles out, the character is now officially dead and The Hero yells, “KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!”
If you wanted to show blood trickling from the ear or from some other wound you’d have to do a lot more makeup work. Blood from the mouth is cheap, easy, and foolproof. And it’s such a longstanding cinematic cliche that the audience knows exactly what it’s supposed to mean.
In the movie “Three Kings,” one of the soldiers gets shot in the chest and the medic installs something, looks like a valve, in his chest. The guy has to release it every so often so he can breathe. The dialogue went by so fast I missed what it was. Was that this scenario?