DIC · Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation

Fire alarm triggered everywhere at once

Imagine a building where one fire alarm (at an injury site) should ring only in that zone, alerting firefighters to spray foam locally and seal the area. But in DIC, someone pulls the master alarm switch—sepsis, trauma, or cancer acts like that switch—so every alarm blares at once. Firefighters (clotting proteins) spray foam (fibrin clots) in every hallway, stairwell, and room, using up all the foam tanks (platelets, fibrinogen). The building fills with blocked passages (microvascular clot formation (thrombosis)), so oxygen cannot reach the offices (organs fail). But because the foam is all used up, when a window breaks (normal bleeding site like an IV hole), there is no foam left to seal it. The only way to stop the chaos is to fix what triggered the alarm—find and extinguish the real fire—or the building collapses.