Word: clots
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...lowered our seats and pulled down the hatches. Now our vision was limited by the slits of our periscopes. The noise of battle was fainter in our ears, but it was still perfectly audible. Sweat began to etch rivulets down dusty faces and clot in the stubble of three-day beards. With brows pressed against the rubber cushion above the periscope we watched the battle panorama unroll. The smell of cordite and the smell of dead bodies filtered through the vents and seemed to enter our pores...
...heparin, was already on the market. It is also used to keep donors' blood fluid until it can be processed. But it is an expensive extract of ox lung and liver, must be given by injection, and is hard to control. Therefore surgeons (who worry lest a fatal clot undo their work) took up Dicumarol...
...patients: as a chronic ulcer does not get enough blood from inside, he supplied it from outside by a spray of blood drawn from the patient or dried blood plasma diluted with only one fourth the usual amount of water. This poultice dried to form a clot over the ulcer; treatments were repeated as needed to retain the scab. One or two applications relieved pain; the ulcers which healed required from one to 20 treatments...
Several days after, while still very sick, the young doctor felt an "agonizing pain" in his legs; they turned cold and blue. The clot had been dislodged from his heart, had traveled along the aorta (main heart artery) till it became stuck at the point where the artery branched in two, low in his back, just above his legs. Calling his nurse, the doctor told her he was doomed, reminded her of a patient who had the same kind of embolism, lost his legs and died...
They gave him a local anesthetic, cut open the arteries high on each leg, broke up the blood clot with a special probe, then sucked out the pieces with a long, slender tube. As soon as his blood vessels were stitched up, the patient was given transfusions and large injections of heparin, a liver extract which prevents clotting. Immediately after the operation, said Drs. Ravdin and Wood, "the color and temperature of the right leg returned to normal." His left leg recovered more slowly. For almost two weeks after the operation, heparin was constantly dripped into his veins...