Non-Blood Volume Expanders include products such as Hetastarch, Pentastarch, Dextran and Saline/Ringer’s Solution. Some patients inquire about the use of these products as an aid in offsetting blood loss.
To help you understand the answers to the above questions, think of your blood as being something like chicken noodle soup:
Suppose that you were preparing a pot of chicken noodle soup that was going to be used to feed ten people. How much soup would you make? You would prepare ten servings to feed your ten guests. Lets now imagine three emergencies with your soup.
Emergency #1: Suppose that when you went to serve your ten guests you found that you actually had not ten but nine servings of soup? A family member ate a serving of soup without your knowledge! What could you do so as to still serve a bowl of soup to each of your ten guests? You could add a serving of ‘Soup Volume Expander’ otherwise known as water. That water would dilute your pot of soup, expanding its volume, so that you once again had ten servings. This culinary sleight of hand would probably go unnoticed by your guests. Only you would realize that the soup was a bit thinner than you had prepared.
Emergency #2: Imagine the same situation again. You have nine servings of soup and ten guests. Suppose that this time instead of adding one serving of water to your pot of soup you that you instead add six servings of water. Would the resulting much more diluted pot of soup more closely resemble the original pot of soup? No. In fact it would now be significantly different so that many of your guests would notice. You would now have fifteen servings of rather thin soup.
Emergency #3: Again you have ten guests to serve chicken noodle soup. You lift the lid off of your pot and discover that the soup is almost all gone! In fact you have just barely one serving of soup left. Once again you could add enough ‘Soup Volume Expander’ - water to the pot to increase the volume to ten servings. But would the result pass very well as chicken noodle soup? No. You probably would decide that you just could not serve soup to your guests.
