A really great view of Riza's neck wound from brotherhood

[sonjajade]

There!  without all the blood we can see much clearer what her wound looked like.

Not being a medical professional myself, the cut we see here is actually of her shirt first.  But we know those mock turtlenecks cling close to the skin, so the cut should be pretty well right under that.  However- it doesn't look that deep, and the deepest part of it, doesn't look like it's at the jugular.  It looks further back to me.  Supposing the wound is that far back and assuming it's not all that deep, would it still be so fatal?  What say you missyquill and cornerofmadness?

Comments

[binaryalchemist.livejournal.com]

I'm not a doctor (a former vet tech, yeah--animal anatomy is my specialty, not human) but if it had been a good jugular slice she'd have bled out pretty quickly, I suspect.

However....I AM an animation art collector, that that's a pretty high quality genga (production sketch). The BroHo gengas are turning up now in the hands of the anime art dealers--this is as nice as some in my own collection. I have several from FMA Classic and CoS but not enough wallspace to get them all framed!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

From the looks of that, it's from at least from her ear to the front of her neck. It would definitely have transected the Jugular in that area. The Jugular being a vein is a slower bleed out than say the Carotid artery. It would take about 2 minutes to bleed out depending on how much of the vein is cut. Was it just the external or the internal Jugular that got cut

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Elevated_JVP.JPG

that's a distended Jugular but you can see it's right in the area of the above pictured wound. Now how deep it is is open to debate. You can't tell from the picture.

[missyquill.livejournal.com]

Maybe its because I only watched the show initially but I somehow thought the cut was up her shoulder or at least the punctured area (a rather shallow cut at that) was in the neck meets shoulder region without hitting any veins. I purely reasoned this out because Riza could talk right afterwords and a cut to the jugular (internal or external) would have impaired speech considerably.

But seeing this, I would say the cut is fairly superficial (at last until we know more about Mei's healing alchemy XD).

I can see how it would make sense plotwise to go for the jugular with the two minute window to force Roy's hand but if that was indeed the case then Mei has some serious skill! But because she says to get Riza to a proper doctor, I always kind of assumed the wound wasn't that serious. Does that make sense?

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

Makes sense to me but I'm thinking it's more Arakawa either didn't research all that well (though she usually did good with that) or took artistic license with it since I took it to be a) life threatening and b) Mei's just that good since Mei was so perfect at everything.

[missyquill.livejournal.com]

Bioalchemy has always been something I wish Arakawa had given us more details on because as much as I love Mei and believe in her talent, patching up a lung or veins in this case wouldnt simply require a patch job but time to heal, which would def affect vocal cords. Then there's the issue of replenishing lost blood, cleansing tissue matter internally and the general weakness from the experience that Riza doesn't seem to display.

I'm thinking artistic license...

We were all probably supposed to take the wound as life threatening (otherwise there wouldn't be much point in Goldtooth's ultimatum) but I've found myself wondering from time to time if he wasn't just taking advantage of Roy's lack of medical knowledge. Idk, it made more sense to me that Riza got a superficial nick on the spinal coloumn area, realized if she made too much noise, Goldtooth wont hesitate to hurt her some more and did the eye communication thing with Roy (who may or may not have thought Riza was dying) and then said no to HT (this works happily with my Royai fangirl side, he would never say no if Riza was in real danger!) And that way, Mei coukd have patched Riza up pretty well for her to be up on her feet the next momemt.

I'm so sorry if non of this makes sense. It's almost 6 a.m. and I'm on night shift at work. XD

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

Yes that is true. though the Jugulars are superficial to both the carotids and the larnyx so it's possible to nick them and not do damage to the deeper tissues (I saw that in my ER rotations) So she might still be able to talk if the Jugulars were transceted.

But yeah, Riza was still able to get up and fight after that so I did wonder how much blood did she loose. I know Roy at least knows some anatomy (we see him studying the spine, one assumes so he can learn to help Havoc).

I'll go along with the wound is more superficial than we were lead to believe. Roy may or may not have realized this and Goldtooth and Bradley realized the threat wasn't working so went an alternative route.