Blood Types

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Weedygarden

Weedygarden

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Do you know your blood type?

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Weedygarden said:
Do you know your blood type?

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A+. Everybody should know their blood type and it should be connected to their ID.
There is no danger of it being misused.
This is one of the very few 'soapbox' topics that I have.
Sometimes minutes matter.
I would not be alive today if it were not for emergency transfusions in 1984.
When you are 2 quarts low, nothing else will do. :eek:
Now, don't let this discourage anyone from donating blood:LOL:.
Yes, it does save lives... even ones like me🤪.
 
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Remember to keep your coconut trees healthy because coconut milk can be used as plasma in humans.
 
This makes me think of the Japanese trend(?) of personality typing by blood type. I also heard that it was popular in South Korea.

Supposedly, your blood type "says" something about your personality.

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In the Pacific islands during WWII the water from coconuts was used to replace blood plasma in IV. As long as the outer shell is not cracked the material inside is sterile and can be used to replace lost plasma in intravenous feed.
 
SheepDog said:
In the Pacific islands during WWII the water from coconuts was used to replace blood plasma in IV. As long as the outer shell is not cracked the material inside is sterile and can be used to replace lost plasma in intravenous feed.
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It may be almost sterile inside the coconut, but try getting it out of the coconut under field conditions and maintain sterility.

However, that's not the worst part. Coconut water does not have the proper pH or salinity to inject into your boodstream. Sure, you could probably get by injecting just a small amount of it - you can do that with plain water too - but any quantity large enough to do much good will probably be a disaster.

The WWII use of coconut water intrigued me, because I had not heard of it. So I did a little research. Indeed they did do this during WWII. To ONE guy. And evidently he survived. Probably not because of the injected coconut water, but in spite of it.
 
Haertig said:
It may be almost sterile inside the coconut, but try getting it out of the coconut under field conditions and maintain sterility.

However, that's not the worst part. Coconut water does not have the proper pH or salinity to inject into your boodstream. Sure, you could probably get by injecting just a small amount of it - you can do that with plain water too - but any quantity large enough to do much good will probably be a disaster.

The WWII use of coconut water intrigued me, because I had not heard of it. So I did a little research. Indeed they did do this during WWII. To ONE guy. And evidently he survived. Probably not because of the injected coconut water, but in spite of it.
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Are the reports true that for the rest of his life he had a craving for macaroons?
 
Trivia:
I did not know they could "shotgun" blood into you if you need it bad.
I watched.
If you think they put a unit of whole blood on an IV pole and let it gravity feed into you like an IV, you are in for a surprise.
They set it up like that, and the nurse puts a blood-pressure cuff around the bag and starts pumping the bulb like crazy.
In less than 2 minutes the bag is empty and they are hooking up another one.
This is why blood and plasma are in bags and not in bottles like every other IV fluid.
Two units of blood into you in less than 4 minutes! :thumbs:.
 
Supervisor, that won't work with coconuts... ;)
 
Supervisor42 said:
I did not know they could "shotgun" blood into you if you need it bad.
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We used to do that when I was a paramedic on an ambulance. We didn't carry blood (because it has to be refrigerated, crossed and type matched), but we had IV solutions. Standard protocol for really bad hypovolemic shock was TWO bags of either Normal Saline or Ringer's Lactate going in simultaneously into two injection sites, large gauge catheters, macrodrip IV setups, and blood pressure cuffs around the IV bags. On top of that, you were wrapped in MAST pants (if not contraindicated by injury location of a few other things). MAST pants are like a "whole-body blood pressure cuff" that you wear around your abdomen and legs. Flush O2. And helicopter transport if available. You have to move really fast. On all the TV shows you see trauma victims getting CPR and then an hour later they are fine. Doesn't happen like that. I have never seen even one person survive if their heart stops due to blood loss. You better be actually sitting on an operating table with surgeons prepped and ready if that happens and you hope to survive.

Coconut water isn't going to cut it either. You blast in two liters of that stuff and you just killed the patient (if they don't die of hypovolemia first).
 
Supervisor42 said:
Trivia:
I did not know they could "shotgun" blood into you if you need it bad.
I watched.
If you think they put a unit of whole blood on an IV pole and let it gravity feed into you like an IV, you are in for a surprise.
They set it up like that, and the nurse puts a blood-pressure cuff around the bag and starts pumping the bulb like crazy.
In less than 2 minutes the bag is empty and they are hooking up another one.
This is why blood and plasma are in bags and not in bottles like every other IV fluid.
Two units of blood into you in less than 4 minutes! :thumbs:.
Click to expand...
They also make spring loaded IV dispensers with a coil spring. We used them on air medivacs. You'd uncoil the spring, drop in the saline, and then set the drip rate that you wanted. You didn't need an IV pole so you could keep the IV fluids warm and under a blanket. I've seen saline freeze in the administration set before it could reach the arm.

I would expect coconut milk to work similar to saline though probably not as well. Too much saline will kill your patient. Saline increases volume but it does not carry oxygen. If someone is dehydrated saline is just fine. If someone is bleeding out you can only thin down their blood so much before they die from lack of oxygen. I can't imagine anyone using coconut milk unless it was a life or death situation and even then they would necessarily use a limited amount, perhaps a litre or so.

I believe that in WWII they used glass IV bottles. That would require a vent to allow air into the bottle otherwise a vacuum to form and the IV fluid would quit flowing shortly. That vent could allow contaminated air into the IV fluid, which is a reason they switched to IV bags. Cost, weight, and breakage are also reasons to switch to plastic.
 
Coconut water can be used over a short period of time and has on more than one case:

"One time was in 1942 in Cuba when 12 children received filtered coconut water in their veins. Another was during WWII when medics for more than one force reported using coconut water when they ran out of IV fluids."

In all cases the duration of treatment was 3 to 4 days and saline was added. Hypovolemia is exactly what the doctors were preventing by adding fluid to the blood.
It is by no means a long term solution but it can keep the red stuff moving through your arteries and veins long enough to get longer term emergency care.
 
SheepDog said:
and saline was added
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That makes all the difference in the world. Better than coconut water with saline added would be plain water (sterile) with saline added (which they probably didn't have in that WWI emergency situation). Sterile water with saline is called "Normal Saline" and it comes prepackaged and is still in use today for volume replacement. You can live with "diluted blood" to a point, so what you get in the short term is IV fluid "volume replacement". It's kind of like your car. In an emergency in the short term, it really doesn't care much if you fill it up the radiator with antifreeze or plain water (so long as it's not freezing out). But just don't run it with too low fluid, whatever that fluid is. IV volume replacement is only good to a point - once your blood is so dilute it doesn't have enough red blood cells in it to carry the oxygen you need, things go from bad to worse. That's one of the reasons why bad trauma patients get high flow O2. Blood also carries away CO2 as well as supplies O2, and contains white blood cells for fighting off the cuties - so you can only limp along with IV fluids and supplemental O2 for so long before you croak.
 
Weedygarden said:
B negative, just like me. I only learned that it was fairly rare a few years ago.
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It is one of the rarer ones. It’s much better to have a very common one for availability should you ever need it. But we really have no choice in our blood type. My Dad was B Negative, also.
Supervisor42 said:
Trivia:
I did not know they could "shotgun" blood into you if you need it bad.
I watched.
If you think they put a unit of whole blood on an IV pole and let it gravity feed into you like an IV, you are in for a surprise.
They set it up like that, and the nurse puts a blood-pressure cuff around the bag and starts pumping the bulb like crazy.
In less than 2 minutes the bag is empty and they are hooking up another one.
This is why blood and plasma are in bags and not in bottles like every other IV fluid.
Two units of blood into you in less than 4 minutes! :thumbs:.
Click to expand...
Very few IV fluids are in glass anymore.
 
I'm AB+

I should donate more. My blood is good for infants I believe. My body goes into a shock when I give. It's not the needle or pain, it's not much anyway. It's 3/4 of the way through and my heart slows way down and I'm fighting not to pass out. like I said, I should be donating more... anyway.
 
Amish Heart said:
And I have RH negative A blood, and I know I can't receive any positive blood. But my mom has it, I can give blood to her, our oldest daughter has it, and a few lady cousins locally have it.
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Not to take away from all of the great uses for coconut milk, but the important part of knowing your blood type is if you need blood or someone you know needs blood.
They can 'straight-pipe' it from one person to another, but they don't like to do that unless they have none of a suitable type to use because of all of the tests they do on donated blood.
Hospitals do run low, or out, of blood, especially after a natural disaster because it only comes from people.
When someone needs blood... plasma, saline, Ringer's Lactate, or coconut water, will not do.
My Doctor: "what's his blood pressure?" Nurse:---------. Doctor: "what's his blood pressure?"
Nurse: <trying to whisper> "I can't get a pulse"
Me: "I promise I got one!!!"
The takeaway: when people need blood it is almost always a life-or-death situation.
Know your type! Save a life.
*I did give the required soapbox warning.
 
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I'm O-, so everybody loves me in a disaster. But only other O- people can help me.

When the SHTF, O- will probably go pretty quickly since anybody can receive it, and I'll be donating a lot. And as all that O- leaves the blood bank, that will leave none for me, and it's the only kind I can take. What's that saying? "No good deed shall go unpunished."

:(
 
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