Week 10: Haemostasis

Aaah. Life is good. I have made excellent progress this afternoon. Just finished reviewing week 10: haemostasis. Haemostasis is an innocent word used to describe a scary concept. Consider this: if you cut yourself, you will hopefully stop bleeding because a clot forms. So clots are good. Unless they form inside you, in which case you will suddenly fall down dead from a heart attack, stroke, or pulmonary embolism. Then clots are not good.

So from day zero we walk on a knife edge, forever balanced between too much of a good thing and not enough of it. It's a crazy system, with dozens of different chemicals all acting on each other in complicated feedback loops to maintain the same kind of dynamic stability that you sometimes see in the mall when that guy juggles two chainsaws and a cat while riding a unicycle.
Fortunately, it's all very easy to remember because the chemicals involved have highly descriptive names. NOT! Ha ha, the old "not!" joke. In fact, the chemicals have bureaucratic names like Factor VIII (if you lack this, you have haemophilia) or protein C (not to be confused with C peptide, C-reactive protein, or protein kinase C, which are obviously very different things!). Oh sure, they have other names but they don't help either. For example, Factor XII is also called Hageman factor because some guy called Hageman didn't have it. Okay.

As I said up front, I've made good progress today. This is because I've been covering things that I worked pretty hard on when I first ran into them. Now the trouble starts. Next up: inflammation. You may remember that I previously posted on this topic out of sheer frustration. Let's see if it's any clearer in hindsight...