I just found out that my dad has a large blood clot in his lung, and I am wondering what this means. If anyone could help me out, i'd really appreciate it!

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http://sassy-kat.diaryland.com

sassy, you can do a search at www.yahoo.com (http://www.yahoo.com) for lung clot blood and find a lot of places to look. I found one good site. Cut and paste this into your address area on your computer and go here: http://www.lung.ca/diseases/pulmonary_embolus.html It talks about pulmonary embolism (a blood clot is one) and here is what it says on treatment:

Treatment

Emergency treatment and hospitalization are necessary. Definitive treatment consists of dissolving the clot by thrombolytic therapy. Anticoagulant therapy is preventive by inhibiting further clot formation.

Thrombolytic therapy (clot-dissolving medication) includes streptokinase, urokinase, or TPA. Anticoagulation therapy (clot-preventing medication) consists of heparin by intravenous infusion initially, then oral warfarin (Coumadin), or subcutaneous heparin may be started concurrently. Oxygen therapy is required to maintain normal oxygen concentrations until the acute injury to the lungs has resolved.

The death rate is 30% with undiagnosed pulmonary embolism. After diagnosis and treatment, the death rate drops to 3%.



So it sounds like your dad will be OK if he's in the hospital getting treatment.

Pulmonary emboli are basically a blockage of blood flow to the lung. These can come from various sources.

Air bubbles in the blood can cause them (air emboli,) blood clots can cause them, and chunks of fat floating around in your blood can cause them, whether from dislodged plaques in the arteries or from a long bone fracture, such as the fracture of your thighbone.

They can vary from the extremely-serious to the extremely-treatable depending on where and how big the clot is.

The big problem is that this clot is blocking off blood flow to a certain area of his lung, which means that that part of his lung effectively doesn't work anymore. What they have to do is make sure he's getting enough oxygen from the rest of his lungs to make up for what he's not getting in that one spot, and try and break up the clot.

'thrombolytic therapy' (thrombus = clot, lysis = break up) is where you give drugs that will help break down the blood clot. You've probably heard these drugs referred to as 'blood thinners'.

Like the previous poster says, your dad is most likely going to be perfectly fine. They're going to be giving him oxygen, making sure he's not having trouble breathing, give him some medicine to break up the clot and possibly put him on some medicine after he comes out of the hospital to keep clots from re-forming again.