As a kid, I bruised all the time, very easily. Nowadays, I don’t bruise at all, with some exceptions.
I broke my toe about a week ago, as in literally snapped the bone in half and ended up with one piece almost a centimeter out of alignment. And yet, no bruise. Not even the slightest sign of one.
Now, the exception is if I’ve been drinking. I broke that same toe 2 years ago while I was drunk and it basically turned black.
I don’t know why I would bruise normally when drinking, but never bruise at all when sober. Is it possible I am bruising and it’s just not visible for whatever reason?
I’m not a medic at all, but would guess that since alcohol tends to liquefy blood, it could explain why you bruise when you’ve been drinking. It’s also the reason why it’s better to not drink alcohol the day before getting a tattoo, as you’ll bleed more.
Now, with the inverse reasoning, maybe you don’t bruise because your blood is “too thick”, whatever that could mean? Maybe ask a physician ?
Also not a medic, but always understood alcohol to be a blood thinner. Not the cause of it’s direct negative effects afaik but would seem to explain difference in bruising while drunk vs sober.
ETA: one of the things I miss from the other site is the chance to ask (claimed) actual doctors and lawyers hypo questions. And pharmacists. Not bc I want advice but bc once I form a proper question, i genuinely want an answer. Sure, I can navigate pubmed and LII at a lay level, but that doesn’t mean I can efficiently translate question into query with the correct verbiage to get useful and valid results - much less definitively and efficiently parse the meaningful bits of journal articles and disregard the rest.
That expertise in sussing out the actual meat of both question and answer was damned useful, damned interesting, and not practical to acquire as a working professional in an unrelated field.
I’m about to be one of the aforementioned. Almost done with the clinical rotation part. You guys are kinda on point, but those effects are minimal. We’d have a lot of leaky drunks on the streets if so.
When you’re drunk you’re much more likely to have hit yourself harder and sloppier than initially thought. More damage might result in a messy wound vs an anticipated accident.
OP has a good reaction time and nice and stretchy arteries
It’s nice to know my arteries are good considering my doctors hate my veins. Getting blood drawn often takes 3 or 4 attempts and when I need an IV they break out the ultrasound.
And the drunk bit does make sense. When I broke my toe while drunk, I didn’t even know it was broken and just kept walking on it, so maybe that’s why it bruised when I normally don’t.
Hahahahaha that is a super pertinent piece of information right there. You kept walking on a broken bone. Owowowowow. I hope everything is all good now!
It was good until I broke the same toe the same way again. I’ll never break any other bones, just that toe over and over again. Luckily there’s been basically no pain this time since I’ve actually been treating it properly and staying off it.