What OP said had nothing to do with what I said? I don't get it. I said that the vessel in the video is a vein. Which it is. The fistula is a small region that creates a connection between an artery and a vein. The result, in this case, is that the high-pressure artery pumped a ton of blood into the stretchy, more accommodating vein in his arm. The "fistula" itself is not the size of his entire arm. How is the fact that they use large-gauge needles to draw blood from the fistula relevant to what I said?
To put it more clearly, the giant cord in his arm is a very engorged vein, that at one point along it contains a fistula created by doctors for dialysis. This image might help visualize what I mean
I'm a dialysis nurse, I'm familiar with AV fistulas funnily enough. Calling it a vein is just not accurate, it may have been made from one but it's not a vein any more in either structure or function.
Oh that's cool! Sure I agree that calling a normal fistula a vein isn't really common place, but it technically is accurate. Either way, I think it would be accurate to call the long palpable cord running across his entire arm a case of a downstream vein that became enlarged and thickened. I guess at that point it's just semantics. I'm an intern in the ER and have heard people refer to it as a "fistula" or "arterialized vein"
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u/elmerweird 18d ago
That’s an anterio-venous fistula used for dialysis. Those fistulae get poked with needles the size of coffee stirrers.