Please indulge me, if you would, in a morbid hypothetical: if I were the unfortunate recipient of a swift slash across the jugular inflicted by someone reasonably skilled in the task, what would I experience in my final moments? I imagine the initial cut would cause some pain but then…? I don’t know much about the effects of sudden, profuse blood loss. Approximately how long would it take me to lose consciousness, and vital signs? I also find myself wondering about the more incidental effects, for example: would the injury be likely to damage certain neck muscles and so hamper me from being able to turn my head?
My next thread will be about fluffy kittens or buttercups, I promise.
I’m not even sure about the initial pain. It is fairly common for victims of knife wounds to not know they are wounded until some time later. One guy in Sydney, after being stabbed, chased his assailant and bled to death, not realising that he had been stabbed.
If your assailant were truly skilled, he/she would go for your carotid artery. Your jugular is a vein, so exsanguination would take longer. You have two carotid arteries, but four jugular veins. The veins are smaller than their companion arteries.
A severed carotid, without immediate intervention, would bring you to unconsciousness with in 1-3 minutes or less, death would follow shortly. A severed jugular would take longer, maybe as much as 6-8 minutes, maybe more.
A severed vessel bleeds slightly more slowly than a partly interupted vessel. A severed vessel will snap back into the surrounding muscle, which puts some pressure on it, slowing the flow, where an interrupted one will be held open, allowing free flow.
The other consideration is bilateral vs unilateral injury. With unilateral injury, you might be able to hold the wound closed until help arrives, because your brain wouldn’t be completely deprived of oxygen, since it would still have blood supply from the uninjured side. That said, rapid blood loss of more that a liter will cause unconsciousness.
You would lose muscle control in the muscles damaged. I doubt you’d have time to look around much, though.
Also, there are other structures in the neck that might be damaged making survival impossible.
The pain you might feel would only be relevant, if you survived for more that a few minutes, your body releases endorphins during extreme stress, that delay pain.
I sliced myself with a scalpel blade once. Bad wound, requiring many sutures to close. I inspected the wound at the time, recognizing tendons etc, but there was very little pain. I would think it would be the same for the OP’s situation. Before any real appreciation of pain would occur, hypoxia would lead to decreased sensation overall.
I saw a dog recently with a severed facial artery. The wound was close to where the facial artery originates at the carotid. The owner looked like she had been playing under the sprinkler (with blood substituted for water). I examined/probed the wound initially without anesthesia and the dog did not mind. Dog survived (with surgery/etc) BTW.
I also saw a dog years ago that had a traumatic forelimb amputation when it was hit by a train. Vessels were ligated prior to any anesthesia, and the dog was pretty happy the entire time.
And the trachea as well. In fact a truly skilled assailant would leave only the spine intact. Course, nowadays it’s hard to find truly skilled assailants.
I once spent some time with a former Special Forces soldier while I was doing research for a videogame. According to him, despite what you see in movies, throat-slitting is not a particularly useful tactic in situations requiring stealth. Even if the job is done perfectly the target typically has a minute or two of fight left – plenty of time to make lots of noise or even injure the attacker. It’s much quieter and safer to just shoot the target in the head with a silenced pistol.
I’m not sure if he was speaking from personal experience or not … .
Assassins these days, got no style. A stiletto slipped between the second and third cervical vertebrae severing the spinal cord is far less messy and much more satisfying.
It might be, if the renal artery was interrupted. It would be a very painful, and lengthy death. Severing the renal artery would cause a retro-peritoneal bleed, which might not be recognized until the victim lost his blood pressure and consciousness.
Spinal cord interuption at C1-C2 would cause the same result.
An ice pick, maybe but a stiletto would probably not be sturdy enough. Cutting through skin and cartilage isn’t as easy as you might think. If you’ve ever disarticulated a chicken, multiply that by about 20. Not that easy. There would still be a considerable amount of blood.
Many of the “suggestions” so far are more theater than reality. IMO.
Even if you are able to get to help without bleeding to death, a severed neck artery has another way it can kill you: air entering the vessel may get to or near the brain and cause a stroke. Medics and EMTs are advised to apply pressure above and below the wound if a severed carotid is apparent.
Not exactly. An artery pushes blood, it doesn’t suck.
The explanation for your confusion is, if one has an open line in a large vein, like the jugular, which comes off the superior vena cava, taking a deep breath will suck air into the line.
It’s very unlikely that the same would happen to a damaged vessel, but not impossible, if the vessel is directly linked to the venae cavae.
No so, with an artery. Veins are basicly passive flow, arterial flow is pumped one direction by the heart. When the pump is disconnected, flow stops, then reverses, due to gravity. There isn’t any negative pressure inside the head to pull air into the interrupted vessel.
Having slit the throats of a few animals let me say that the idea of a person having minutes of fight left in them after the carotid is severed is sheer fantasy. At best an animals with a severed carotid has 10 seconds of CONSCIOUSNESS, and that is spent lying on the ground kicking, not struggling or fighting.
The point everyone is overlooking is that the brain has a pressure control system. The brain is an extremely delicate organ with a lot of very fine blood vessels, and if any of those vessels rupture irreparable damage is likely to occur. Not surprisingly the body has evolved a spectacularly sensitive pressure control system to stop the brain being over or under supplied with blood. The main location of that pressure control system is within the carotid sinus.
In simplified terms if the area around the carotids experiences a blood pressure change the body initiates a fainting reaction. The body collapses to bring the heart and brain to the same level. That enables it to regian control of blood pressure to the brain. When an animal has its carotid severed the blood pressure decrease causes the animal faints, not within minutes but within seconds. And that reflex is even stronger in bipedal humans than in quadripeds.
I am far from being a skilled assailant but I know that I could make reasonable fist of cutting someone’s throat (assuming I didn’t faint first, which is very likely). All you would feel would be a pressure and sting like a bad shaving cut. As others have noted cuts from sharp blades just don’t hurt much until well after the event. You would feel the equivalent of a couple of cups of warm water flowing rapidly down your chest, but unless you looked you wouldn’t even realise it was your blood. In less than a second you would feel woozy, as if you had stood up too fast from a lying position. You would then probably feel a wave of severe nausea and then your vision would cloud and you would faint. After that you would know no more. Within 3 minutes you would be dead without ever regaining consciousness.
Someone suggested that structural support could stop the bleeding of a severed carotid. That maybe so but it would make no difference since with a severed carotid the brain has no blood supply. It’s equivalent to a massive stroke. Even if you don’t bleed to death you will die from oxygen deprivation of the brain. Unless some miracle caused the two severed ends to rejoin and a neat circular clot form to actually allow re-established blood flow it doesn’t really matter whether the animal is exsanguinated or not. There is no blood supply to the brain, whether the blood stays in the body is rather beside the point.
