What is "pulmonary edema"?
Pulmonary edema is a term used to describe the development of lung water. This is not water that nessessarly is like a sack of water. You can develope lung water in the thoracic cavity, in the plural space and that is called a plural fusion, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about water that forms either in the intersticial area of the lung, or in the aveliar sack itself. It can get there because the lung is absorbing the effects of the heart failing. Then we call that congestive heart failure, it's congesting the lung with pulminary edema fluid. You can have a special system set up where the avular capilary bed gets little wholes punched in it because of infection and inflamation and then fluid, water leak into the avelas and that becomes pulminary edema. So there are many reasons for pulminary edema. But the most common reason for pulminary edema is left heart failure or for instance a heart attack, or something happens to the effieciency of the heart, so it can't pump blood forward out to the rest of the body as effciently as it once did, and so the fluid and the pressure backs up and squishes water out into the lung meat and forms pulmonary edema.
