Does anyone know how serious very low hemoglobin is for a woman (90)?

Oh my. Has anyone mentioned hospice? It might be tome for palliative (comfort) care, as ipposed to trying to cure this.

I want add (my apolologies - long day) MD wants to avoid doing an endoscopy due to her age, frailty. She needed 5 units of blood.

Thank you to all for your responses. They want her to complete all transfusions . before they continue with tests. However, she has a history of gastritis/peptic ulcer. On top of this, she has dementia and is being difficult. Today she actually pulled out the transfusion IV ! I will be back tomorrow as we should know more.

ER will do bloodwork, and check for blood in urine and stool. They will check 02 levels and may add oxygen. They might even do some imaging studies to look for the leak. At 90, it could just be a gradual shutting down of the bone marrow. Not much fix for that. Transfusion buys time , but it is not a permanent fix.

How low? And how changed from her last reading, and when was that?

One difficulty is that obvious treatments such as transfusion are also not risk-free for very frail patients. Depending on the cause and the ER's findings there could be some difficult decisions ahead - but I hope it turns out to be a salvageable situation, and please let us know how it goes.

This is a very serious situation. This could be an internal bleeding problem, but there are many many other things it could be...bone marrow disease, cirrhosis, leukemia, other cancers, etc. etc. I am also interested in what the ER found.

It could mean that she has internal bleeding. What did the ER docs say?