I dont think i could post this somewhere else . I hope that somebody has medical knowledge . Yesterday i saw the Black Hawk Down and after a ranger platoon arrives at crash site number two one guy gets wounded in femoral artery (i think this is how it is spell) and they open his pants in order to see the wound the blood comes out like a fountain . Could this really happen ???
P.S. I asked a friend of mine who is in medicine school but he didn’t know
I haven’t seen that scene so I don’t know how big the spurt was but, yes, a femoral artery spurt can go several feet (or a metre or so, maybe more).
The femoral artery is a major artery supplying the largest muscle groups in the body, being in the leg, so it carries a large volume of blood.
Every minute the heart can pump a quantity of blood through it roughly equivalent to the total volume of blood in the body.
Arterial blood is under pump pressure the whole time.
Put all those factors together and severing a femoral artery has the potential to drain the body of blood in a minute or so.
If the artery is not severed and the wound is not fully open to allow drainage, it will take longer to drain the body of blood. The time will be proportionate to the size of the hole in the artery.
The arterial spurt will probably be greater the smaller the hole. Think of a water hose and how its spurt increases if you put your finger over the open end to reduce the size of the hole for the water under pressure to escape.
Apart from severing the aorta, severing a femoral artery (or maybe a carotid artery as the brain and head have a huge demand for blood as well) is probably the quickest way to bleed someone to death.
Which is one reason why idiots who say police should shoot people in the leg to avoid putting the target’s life at risk have no idea what they are talking about.
On the positive side, compressing a femoral artery wound by simply placing your hand over it and pressing down will often stem the blood loss sufficiently to enable the patient to survive until medical treatment arrives.
(This is basic medical and first aid knowledge. If your medical student mate is anywhere past the first year of his course, scratch him off your list of doctors to see if you have a femoral artery wound. 
)
Just remembered seeing a film ages ago about a diver who had his leg severed by a shark and, as one now expects, it’s on youtube.
Note the huge volume of blood expelled from the completely severed artery after he’s laid down. It would have been a spurt rather than a gush if he’d had a smaller wound which didn’t sever the artery, or which left tissue around a severed artery to prevent free drainage
DO NOT WATCH THIS IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE UPSET BY SEEING A MAN WHO HAS JUST HAD HIS LEG BITTEN OFF BY A SHARK.
I think it pumps 24-30 litres of blood . I dont know if it is right but i think i had read this and thanks for the info
[/QUOTE](This is basic medical and first aid knowledge. If your medical student mate is anywhere past the first year of his course, scratch him off your list of doctors to see if you have a femoral artery wound. )[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the tip RS but it is his first year , what’s why he doesn’t know that
, i hope :lol::lol:
Well i am not upset but jesus christ he lost 6,5 pounds of blood . That’s a really big amount right ??? 3 kilograms or a little less from what i know
It was pints (imperial volume measure), not pounds (imperial weight measure).
An imperial (as distinct from US) pint is about 570ml.
P.S. An adult human body holds about 8 imperial or 10 US pints.
Perhaps the diver was talking in US pints as it seems unlikely that he could survive after losing 6.5 imperial pints out of 8 pints, but I don’t know.
Absolutely. I was in EMT school 2 years ago, and on St. Patricks day I was doing my clinicals when the third call of the day was for a triple gun shot wound. One of the wounds had severed the femoral artery, and I have never ever in my life seen that much blood.
The Dutch police actually TRAIN to do this! First it’s a very difficult shot, particularly at night, so the likelihood of missing is very high, putting the public at risk (which is exacerbated by the ridiculous choice of solid brass hollowpoint bullet), and the standard of shooting of most policemen is very, very poor.
When I heard a policeman explaining this to me, my jaw dropped.
RS thanks thanks for correcting . But it was really sound like pound .
P.S. Probably i had a dose of luck when i gave exams for English:lol::lol:
Yeah it sounds crazy . But who knows … Strange things happen …
Well, if they managed to get him new blood in time, I don’t see how it should be impossible for him to survive. I’d worry a lot more about infections in the wound… I have no idea how that works, but would the salt in the salt water have helped clean the wound (though also making it more painful), or would the bacteria, etc, in the Oceanic water still infect the wound?
A friend once cut his wrist badly and he came into my house to get help. From the point he walked in the ceilings were covered in blood. He held his wrist upright and the blood spurted like a fountain from the wound.
I dont what is about rambo movies but when he gets wounded it always seems unrealistic
As distinct from the convincing realism in the rest of a Rambo movie?
Or most other movies, such as someone shot only in the ‘shoulder’, which isn’t a serious wound?
Anatomically, many cinematic ‘shoulder’ wounds would mean a lung shot and a sucking wound, which is in fact a very serious wound and quite capable of causing death if not quickly and competently treated.
It’s probably the way he only seems to be bothered by the wound for the first few seconds, and doesn’t give a damn about it after that:D
At the rate the heart is pumping blood out, the body’s volume of blood can reduce very quickly with a major wound. The less blood in the body, the less oxygen and other necessaries are transported to the organs which need them. Most organs can’t survive long, or without potentially permanent damage, without a constant blood supply. It seems unlikely on simple arithmetic that a body designed to run on 8 pints could survive on 1.5 pints for very long without major damage.
Salt in water at sea water concentrations is a mild antiseptic, and before perhaps the middle of the 20th century was often used as a simple remedy for various infections, particularly in the mouth and throat. (I gargle every few hours with salt water and a mild disinfectant at the first sign of a sore throat, which is usually the precursor to a week or two of a cold / flu experience and it almost always works.)
I think it works by killing bacterial cells by drawing fluid out of them, or maybe this doesn’t kill them but damages them enough to stop them reproducing, which is what makes infections worse.
I suspect that sea water in the ocean generally doesn’t have much bacteria that will infect humans. However, closer to shore and especially close to major cities and sewage outfalls there is probably a much higher count of dangerous bacteria such as e coli from human faeces and other human wastes and activities. That is certainly the case with our beaches here. I suspect that the further off shore you are (and he was a fair way off shore) the less the risk of infection from sea water borne bacteria.
Anyway, if he gets to a hospital (in Australia anyway) alive, as a standard step he’ll be given whatever is necessary to reduce the risk of infection for the type of wound he has. Which is a bit ironic as if he has to stay in hospital his chances of getting some really nasty and even incurable infections go up dramatically as hospitals are full of them (in Australia anyway).
As for salt water adding to pain in the wound, I doubt it would add noticeably to it. Severe crush wounds usually have less pain than equivalent cut wounds as the crushing damages nerve ends which would otherwise transmit pain. I suspect that a shark bite which can sever a leg is a mix of crush and cut. In any case, the level of shock from such a wound would probably override the relatively minor input of stinging from salt water.
A puncture or GSW that opens the femoral artery is more likely to allow the cas to bleed out than a traumatic amputation.
While in the former the claret has fairly free egress, blood vessels have somewhat elastic properties and should the limb be severed they contract both in length and diameter, reducing fluid loss. Hence a number of authenticated cases where a casualty has retrieved their arm before receiving medical attention.
The amount of bleeding is of course dependent on a number of other factors such as physical condition, aerobic state, adrenalin saturation percentage, etc.
Reference salt water being painful in a wound, this is a myth.
The body and fluids contain a fair amount of salts and is far more comfortable with this than with ‘pure’ water - just think about saline drips.
During IMI trg troops get to inject one another with a saline solution as distilled water bloody smarts !
As R S* says, salt water is an excellent remedy/prophylactic for sore throats.
Thanks for that.
It explains why the bloke in the shark video was brought aboard and lay on the deck for many heartbeats before he gushed blood.
If I may offer this as wise advice to younger members who, in hope, have a foil or other packet which contains a prophylactic, you should not use your prophylactic to try to stem a sore throat as it will, most probably, simply choke you.
Conversely, if you do not use your prophylactic in other circumstances your partner may end up with a very sore throat, which no amount of salt water or even modern antibiotics will cure.
So, the health message is: use a franger for a banger, and a rubber for a sucker.