Medical question: blood turning to water?

For the purposes of fictional writing:

What would be the effects on a person if their blood turned into pure water (retaining the salt content) over the period of say, one week? If the blood were to become thinner and thinner, becoming more like water.

IANA Doctor, but I do have some basic knowledge. First the extreme thinning of one’s blood is different from the transformation of one’s blood to water. I only know what would happen if one did not have blood in their vessels.

Immediately coming to mind is the fact that one’s blood contains a substance called Hemoglobin, it gives blood its reddish tint. This substance carries oxygen very effectively. I don’t believe water would be able to carry it as well. If so I believe you would die due to lack of oxygen. If not you would probably be extremely weakened.

Secondly, water does not contain platelets to my knowledge. Therefore this should in practice turn you into a hemophiliac. One would not be able to start the
platelet---->thromboplastin----->fibrin (dropping steps in order to be brief) sequence. A simple cut would bleed and bleed and bleed.

That covers everything in my knowledge. Oh yeah no white BLOOD cells. Viruses, Bacterias, etc have a free ride. I hope that helps.

Lost In Reality

One’s skin color is also affected by blood, so the person would become very pale.

If everything except the salts were removed the effects would very rapidly become fatal. A very important part of the blood are the plasma proteins that float free outside of blood cells. These proteins are respsonsibel for maintaining the water balance between the blood stream and the other tissues of the body. If the protein levels drop even a small amount the capacity for the kidney’s to reclaim water is significantly affected, leading to an increase in the urination rate, a need for excessive amounts of water and a serious risk of dehydration, with all the associated symptoms. As the protein levels continued to fall water begins to flow back into the organs from the bloodstream. Under normal circumstances the body will rectify this by pumping more protein into the blood stream, but if in this instance there is something preventing this from happening then the vital organs and nervous system will rapidly cease to function due to osmotic stress. If you removed all non-saline components from the blodstream evenly over a week so you have a constant rate of 14% of cells, proteins etc. leaving each day I’d make a WAG that the victim would be very nearly incapacitated due to osmotic stress by the end of the first day. A 14% irreversible loss of plasma proteins is fairly nasty. By the time he got to 30% he’d be hovering on the edge of death. By the time he reached 44% he’d be dead for certain.

The symptoms of such massive water retention I don’t know for sure, but of a certainty the lower extremities would swell dramatically and I’d WAG that the face would begin to look puffy. Beyond that I imagine that numbness and loss of co-ordination and personality changes such as irritability caused by gradual nerve/brain death would follow.

Loss of blood cells kills fairly slowly so that wouldn’t be a likely cause of death. After all the average 500ml blood donation removes about 10% of the bloods cells, proteins etc. with no ill effects, and although the proteins are rapidly replaced the RBCs take sevral days at least to reach previous levels. people have gotten down to something like 5% RBC volumes before dieing with the use of non-blood expanders.

this is all very useful information. But I’d also like to know how this person would feel while this was happening.

time to have some Sour Apple BubbleTape.

Easily tired, shorter and shorter of breath with less and less exertion, eventually constantly gasping for air, sensation of drowning, very very very unpleasant death.

Qadgop, MD