All right. Welcome. My name is Divine. This is episode 605 of the Divine Intervention Podcast.

Into this podcast, I'm going to be addressing a topic that is ridiculously high yield to know for your exams.

Ridiculously high yield to know for your exams. In fact, I'm going to call this the Clutch Red Blood Cell

Podcast, the Clotch Red Blood Cell podcast. The stuff that I'm going to discuss here,

you're going to see tested so many different ways on your exams, literally, so many different

ways on your exams, right? Again, our friends at the MBMEs, they have a pretty strong emphasis

on hematology. So I really want to make sure that you have a solid basis. You may notice that

quite a number of my podcasts in recent times have been tilted towards some kind of bizarre topics.

Red blood cells are one of those are bizarre, bizarre topics. So I think that's a very important thing to kind of keep at the back of your mind, right? So let's go ahead and talk about red blood cells, right? Let's go ahead and talk about red blood cells, right? We know that red blood cells, they're also known as the erythro sites. And I'm going to make so many integrations, God willing, as we go along, right? but they know they're a retro sites and we know that their job is

pretty straightforward, right? Well, it involves a lot of processes, but it's generally pretty

straightforward. They essentially carry oxygen from your lungs to your peripheral tissues. That's

literally their job. They carry oxygen from your lungs to your peripheral tissues. And then,

don't forget that there's this thing called reticulocytes, right?

These are like immature red blood cells, right?

The red blood cells are immature.

And you may wonder, why would I be making red blood cells that are immature?

That doesn't make any sense.

Well, the reason you do that is if you're in a situation where you're kind of running out of red blood cells fast, right? You're literally running out of red blood cell fast. Red blood cells fast. You're like, hmm, interesting. I need to figure out a way to deal with this red blood cell issue, right? So you're like, hey, even if I, even if the amature, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to pump them out. I'm literally just going to pump them out, right?

So typically you're going to see that when you have a condition of hemolysis, right? You're having a lot of hemolysis, right? So your red blood cells are not living for 120 days like they showed. So you keep just pumping out, pumping out red cells, even if they're immature red blood cells, right? You know, even if you've lost, and that also happens when you've lost a ton of blood very quickly.

Your body is like, oh no, I need to replenish my red blood cell count, right? And then you just pump out, pump out, pump out as many as you can, right? Reticulocytes, right? So, whenever you have a higher retic count, it tells you that, you know, your bone marrow is probably doing pretty well. It's probably doing pretty well. You're just losing red blood cells really, really fast.

But if your tick count is low, it kind of tells you that maybe your bone marrow is not very,

it's not working very well, if you know what I mean, right? It's not working very well, right? And then

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