Blood+Clotting

=**This is the process of blood clot formation:**=
 * The first step in the chain of blood clot formation is that some kind of injury to a blood vessel that makes a rough spot in its lining.Normally the lining is extremely smooth.
 * Almost immediately, damaged cells in the injured vessel wall release certain clotting factors in plasma. These factors rapidly react with other factors already present in the plasma to form prothombin activator.
 * When this happens, the platelets become sticky at the point of injury and soon accumulate near the opening in the broken blood vessel, forming a soft, temporary platelet plug.
 * If there is a normal amount of calcium in the blood, prothombin activator triggers the next step of clotting by converting prothombin (a protein in normal blood) into thrombin.
 * In the last step thrombin reacts with fibrinogen (a normal plasma protein) to form fibrin. Fibrin looks like a tangle of fine mesh like fibers. The fibrin forms a meshlike shape that traps the RBC's in the tangle.
 * This meshlike structure is the blood clot that forms a more long-term seal of damaged blood vessel.[[image:coolnurses/blood_clot.jpg]]