Common Symptoms of Internal Bleeding
Board-certified emergency medicine physician Zachary Lutsky, MD, has served as a physician at several California-based medical institutions, including Santa Monica/UCLA Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In these roles, Dr. Zachary Lutsky has handled a wide range of trauma situations, including pregnancies, shootings, and car accidents.
Trauma, pregnancy, and broken bones are just some of the things that can cause internal bleeding. Since this type of bleeding occurs within the body, spotting it is often very difficult. Unfortunately, this is what makes internal bleeding a potentially life-threatening condition. If too much blood pools in the body, it causes people to go into shock or compresses organs to the point where they can no longer function properly.
Although some people don’t experience symptoms of internal bleeding until hours after the bleeding began, it’s still important to recognize the signs of internal bleeding. These include numbness, minor issues with vision, dizziness, severe weakness, and chest pain. In situations where internal bleeding is severe, people often experience such symptoms as rapid heart rate and vomiting blood.
Some of these symptoms do vary depending on the location of the bleeding. When someone has internal bleeding in the brain, he or she will often display lethargy or other signs of decreased mental functioning. Meanwhile, bleeding in the eyes creates hazy vision or floating objects in a person’s sight, stomach and small intestine bleeding is associated with black bowel movements, and internal bleeding in the forearm is accompanied by pain and tingling.
