My daughter works at the Nick-you, the neonatal intensive care unit, in a hospital. They deal with babies who are born prematurely. Whenever I see her, like I did today at lunch, she has a new horror story to tell. I imagine that most of the babies who come thru the Nick-you survive and go on home to become fully functioning babies, but the ones I hear about are abysmally sad.
In the Netflix series Kill Me Love Me, the princess marries the emperor, gets pregnant, but then miscarries, hemorrhages and bleeds to death. This is something that still happens to women. Not often, but it does still happen. Reminds me of a line from a movie where a woman is counseling her daughter that while men fight wars, a woman's battlefield is in giving birth.
If someone is hemorrhaging and you can't stop the bleeding, the best thing you can do is to supply them with new blood via transfusions. I imagine the expectation is that eventually that the blood will start to clot and the hemorrhaging will stop. It may take a lot of blood to accomplish this. What is a lot? I have no idea. A quart? A gallon? A tank truck load? In any case you have a better chance if you have a large quantity of blood on hand, a blood bank if you will.
Evidently some hospitals have blood banks and some do not. And how much blood would a prudent hospital have on hand, and how long can you keep that blood? I imagine blood has a 'best used by date' and I imagine it's not that far off, which means the blood needs to be replaced periodically.
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