Symptoms

If a patient presents with bleeding and let’s say more active bleeding. In other words, the patient either vomits blood or what we call coffee grounds, which is actually digested blood, but it looks like dark coffee grounds. That’s a symptom that you should be very concerned about. Or let’s say if a patient feels kind of weak or woozy, when that happens, person is probably lost about at least 15% of their blood volume. And if they were to stand up and they actually fainted, then that means they’ve lost at least a third of their blood volume. So those are just rough rule of thumb. But patient, let’s say, who presents with a bleeding ulcer, they may present with either a black bowel movement because that represents digested blood. It’s passed from the stomach through the GI tract, or in cases where the blood is, excuse me, where the bleeding is very vigorous, you may see actually frank red blood. That’s a very serious condition, which requires immediate therapy.