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Angie . 7/10/26 Angie . 7/10/26

Platelets

Platelets, legally termed thrombocytes, are tiny, disc-shaped cellular fragments manufactured within your bone marrow that circulate dynamically through the bloodstream. Their primary cellular responsibility is to aggregate and bind together at the site of a damaged blood vessel to form a physical haemostatic plug, halting active bleeding and initiating the cascade required for wound healing.

Angie . 6/28/26 Angie . 6/28/26

INR - International Normalized Ratio

The INR test is a standardized laboratory calculation derived from a Prothrombin Time (PT) blood test. Prothrombin time measures exactly how many seconds it takes for the liquid portion of your blood, or plasma, to form a solid clot

Angie . 5/20/26 Angie . 5/20/26

Portal Hypertension & Movie Plot Plagiarism

Portal hypertension is one of those cirrhosis complications that, looking back, absolutely should have terrified me more than it did. But in the chaos of Winter 2024, it honestly did not make the leaderboard.

And that is not because portal hypertension is boring. In fact, it is arguably one of the most cinematic, body-horror-adjacent concepts in all of liver disease. I think it just sounded too absurd at the time to emotionally process. Because when doctors first started explaining it to me, all I really heard was: your liver is scarred, the blood cannot move correctly, pressure is building, veins can rupture, and technically yes, one in your neck could explode.

And I remember thinking:

That sounds medically dramatic.
That sounds fear-mongery.
That sounds like somebody got a little too excited in the pathology textbook section.

Because how does: “my liver is sick” somehow become: “my veins are auditioning for a low-budget horror film”? The escalation felt narratively unreasonable.