Assume you’ve just run a short con. The mark figures it out and hits you in the stomach with a bat. You have only a small bruise on your stomach, but you can’t keep anything down and, in fact, you throw up coffee-colored stuff.
Your no-good and kind of creepy mother finds you in this state, and takes you to the hospital, where you’re diagnosed as having some kind of internal hemorrhage. The treatment, near as I can tell, consists of lying in bed immobilized for several days, while they give you blood and saline and pump your stomach, and your mother arranges for pretty nurses to fuss over you while she watches your reaction (told you she was kind of creepy). Then, after a few days, you get to go home.
How does that treatment – rest, blood, saline, stomach pumping – “cure” the problem?
The “coffee-colored stuff” you were throwing up is BLOOD. You were probably losing lots of it. The solution? Give you some more blood. Blood doesn’t belong in the stomach. The solution? Pump all that blood out until you stop bleeding.
Moving around can break clots and prolonge healing, so it’s best to rest and let your body heal and your wounds clot.
Saline? Well, everyone gets saline. In your situation it has the added benefit of keeping your volume up and keeping a line open–just in case. Plus, if you can’t keep down any fluids at all, it will keep you from getting dehydrated.
Depending on the injury.
The one thing that wound has going for it, is it’s closed. If the wound can heal on its own, let it. No reason to go opening someone up and complicating things with risks of infection and complications from surgery and anesthesia. If surgery is indicated, then they would do it. And post surgery would most likely involve-- you guest it-- lots of bed rest.
Best treatment for internal hemorrhage is whatever stops the hemorrhage. Someone throwing up digested blood should have a scoping done, to see if the blood is from esophageal tears, erosive gastritis, or bleeding ulcer. And see if the bleeding is active or not. Then institute the appropriate therapy to stop the bleeding/heal the lesion, depending on what the lesion actually is.
Note that the story (which, to relieve the anxiety of those who are waiting in anticipation, is in fact Jim Thompson’s The Grifters) takes place in the 1950’s and so scoping is not an option.
While we’re on the topic of medical treatment in noir pulp novels, what the hell is the ailment that causes Mildred Pierce’s daughter to die so suddenly in that eponymous novel? The only symptoms are a strong fever and a blister on her upper lip. From that, in a span of hours, she goes into shock and dies. (I believe they were going to attempt a blood transfusion before she goes into cardiac arrest.)
I’ll do the favor of not asking what was wrong with The Solider In White.
Probably meningiococcemia. It’s one infection that, untreated kills quickly. (The link is a news story, not a med link If you want a med link, I’ll find you one.)
Internal bleeding in the stomach and abdomen has many possible causes and treatments. If someone has a small amount of bleeding from the stomach, 80% of these lesions will stop bleeding on their own. Treatment consists on giving blood and fluid to replace losses and some rest. If vomiting, a tube through the nose into the stomach attached to intermittent suction will help decompress the stomach and bowel.
In children, even severe abdominal trauma can often be treated with aggressive administration of fluid and blood, instead of surgery. At a recent emergency confernece, Toronto’s highly respected Hospital for Sick Children suggested the vast majority of pediatric spleen, liver, pancreatic and general abdominal trauma could avoid surgery, especially if the bowel or kidney pedicle was not involved.
In adults, surgery would often be indicated for abdominal hemmorhage. Stomach bleeding often settles down, and surgery may consist of putting a camera into the stomach (esophagus and duodenum) and seeing that the bleeding has stopped, or injecting a “sclerosing agent” to make it do so.
Even assuming that the mark used the Flying Fox, the largest species of bat, there’s no way they would cause real damage. The bat would turn into gello long before a human sustained any real injury.
Somebody beating a bat, one with a three foot wingspan, to death against your stomach would tend to be a rather traumatic experience though.
Less than one half of one percent of bats in North America are rabid.
On the off chance you are beaten with a rabid bat, you need to get the shots before symptoms appear. Fortunately, there are now less injections, and they aren’t in the stomach.
