The bleeding inside Karen’s liver caused her liver to swell. This put pressure on her right lung making it hard to take deep breaths, so her breathing all week long was shallow and labored. The liver has an encapsulation around it (imagine a balloon) which contained the bleeding and served to apply pressure to the source of the bleeding. It’s believed that encapsulation ruptured as evidenced by her excessive pain Friday night. Furthermore, a CT scan which was done very early Saturday morning showed blood outside of the encapsulation. For this reason, it was decided that the bleeding needed to be stopped, and quickly.
The procedure that was done to stop it was an Arterial Embolization. This was done under a general anesthetic. All week long Karen had been having trouble breathing so they put her on a ventilator for the procedure. This appears to have been a good decision as she’s still having some trouble breathing on her own. She received 4 units of blood during and after the procedure to try to replace the blood she lost.
If I understood the doctor correctly, 20% of the blood to the liver comes from two main arteries and 80% comes from veins from the colon (read more here). In Karen’s case, they totally closed off the arteries which feed the liver. This is not a problem because blood still gets there from the veins. Furthermore, the liver is a very resiliant organ and has the ability to regenerate missing or damaged pieces of it (though this may take years). Closing the arteries was necessary to stop the bleeding.
The doctor also found an anurysm in a vein in her stomach. This is a weakened / swollen blood vessel which may burst and (again) cause excessive bleeding, so he blocked that blood vessel off also.
After the procedure Karen was moved to the Intensive Care Unit (aka Critical Care). That happened Satuday afternoon, Nov 21st.
