So last week, a friend of mine had an angiogram, which means that the doctors cut a slit in her femoral artery and stuck a little camera up the tube to look around in her heart. After the procedure, she had to have direct and HARD pressure on the area for ten or so minutes to seal the hole. Then she had several days of bed rest, on threat of popping the seal.
This week, I’m reading a book with vampires. Part of this book’s concept, as it is in many other vampire book’s concepts, involves people being bitten repeatedly and living through it without any special medical care.
How about it? Is the leg artery injury more vulnerable to having people bleeding out than the classical neck bite would be? Would a puncture wound heal differently than a knife slit? Is there a plausible circumstance where someone could get holes in their arteries and live, without medical intervention? What is the minimum blood loss from an arterial wound, assuming nobody is actively sucking at it? Assuming it is little enough for them to go on with their lives right away, would the victim be in danger or normal activity reopening the artery?
Vampire saliva has coagulants.
I don’t know about vampires that resemble humans, but vampire bats have anticoagulants in their saliva to make the blood flow.
You’re looking for a Factual Answer about Vampire bites?
What kind of answer are you looking for? How does one compare a real world surgical puncture of an artery with a fictional puncture by a fictional being with possibly magical qualities?
IANADr, but I’d guess they stitched, or bound up, or used some kind of adhesive to seal the wound. An adhesive would need some time to set.
I do know the femoral artery is a major artery and it is certainly possible to die if it’s cut. I don’t think the same is true of every artery.
Clearly you’re BOTH right – while the (human, not bat) vampire is drinking your blood, they pump in the anticoagulants and anesthetics and narcotics, but when they’re done, they secrete coagulants and lick it onto your neck wound. You’re all high from the narcotics and just lie back and bliss out long enough for the coagulants to clog up the holes in your arteries.
See? Science is fun!
That title sure makes the Straight Dope feel somewhat gangster in a geek way. Especially after coming from a pit bull thread…
I wasn’t looking for vampire lore. I was looking for answers about how the human body’s blood system works. So, ignoring that I thought of this question because I read a vampire book-
Is the leg artery injury more vulnerable to having people bleeding out than the neck artery? Would a puncture wound heal differently than a knife slit? Is there a plausible circumstance where someone could get holes in their arteries and live, without medical intervention? What is the minimum blood loss from an arterial wound, assuming nobody is actively sucking at it? Assuming it is little enough for them to go on with their lives right away, would the victim be in danger or normal activity reopening the artery?
I’ve gone through a renal angiogram. The doctor eneterd a vein in my groin and slid a catheter up to my kidney. I will not tell you exactly what happened then (too gruesome) but eventually I was stitched up and rolled back to my ward where I spent a day in bed before I was allowed to walk on my feet again. I suppose going through an artery or a vein are two very different things.
Arteries are deeper in the neck. Nobody is sucking blood from neck arteries. At the very least, they are sucking directily from the vein, but even that is doubtful. Most likely they are just making a hole in the skin.
For the sake of argument, even if the veins are punctured, it doesn’t take the same healing time as an artery. Nurses and phlebotomists poke holes in veins all day. They heal up pretty quickly, immediately even. The pressure in a vein is nowhere near the same as an artery and there is no danger of “blowing a seal” or anything like that.
I had an angiogram done a week ago last Friday. The procedure was at about 1230. I was back on my feet at about 5pm and on my way home at 6.
I have a pretty impressive bruise from the direct pressure applied. They take the bleeding thing pretty seriously.
There’s a new product called Mynx that has eliminated the need to immobilize the patient for several hours with twenty pounds of sandbags in their groin. It’s a gel pellet that’s placed at the incision in the femoral artery and over a week or two, the gel is absorbed by the body.
If you get a Mynx after an angioplasty / angiography or whatever other procedure involves making a hole in the femoral artery, you’ll still need to be careful for a few days - if you managed to dislodge the patch, you could exsanguinate in a few minutes and be dead before the paramedics arrived.
That’s based on the average adult having a blood volume of about five liters, and the typical output of a normal heart is to circulate about five liters per minute. An incision into the femoral artery may not pass five liters per minute, but even if it’s “only” pumping out one liter per minute, you’d be in hypovolemic shock after a minute.
Not only are arterial wounds under much more pressure than veinous ones, but also the character of the wound matters. Surgical wounds sliced with nice sharp blades do not disturb the flesh as much as rougher handling like a bite which could involve tearing, and the roughness of the wound (as I understand) tends to cause things to clamp shut.
I had a thingie removed from my nose by a dermatologist, and it bled like you would not believe, splashing onto the floor. I was in the chair, they turned me upside down so my feet were pointing at the ceiling, and squeezing my nose with a death grip. For almost half an hour. While a raging thunderstorm was going on outside the glass wall. That was one peculiar day. (and they said the hole would ‘close up’ on its own, eventually, and it never did. I’ve got a good sized scoop on the tip of my nose.)