#so I imagine it would have more to do with muscle relaxing and analgesia than wound repair

[avayarising]

Okay so I’ve thought a bit more about this and I think I have figured out what’s going on.

Here’s Tim having been pushed from the dinosaur onto Jason’s memorial case:

Tim doesn’t say the bleeding has stopped. He says he has stopped the bleeding. He has actively done something. We didn’t see him still putting pressure on the wound in the previous panel, so it must be something else.

This is how Tim survived being stabbed in the chest by Jason in Battle for the Cowl, at least long enough for Damian and Squire to rescue him before the cave he was in collapsed.

If he did consciously use the same technique when pushed off the dinosaur by Damian, then when he says here that he forgot about it and didn’t know it would work, he means that he forgot to use it in that moment and didn’t realise he had trained it enough for it to automatically kick in as a reflex. Because how would you know that, until it happened for real?

(Jason thinks Tim’s dead here, so this possum reflex never occurred to him, which suggests that Bruce never taught it to Jason. This is Bruce giving Tim every single thing he can think of to help save his life, because he didn’t do enough for Jason.)

Here’s Bruce consciously using the same technique:

On the other hand, here’s Tim in Hush, a couple of years before the dinosaur incident, crediting Catwoman with stopping his bleeding after Jason (pretending to be Clayface pretending to be Jason) cuts his throat:

We don’t see Jason do more than slice a thin line in Tim’s throat, nor do we see much blood when Catwoman pulls him off him or when she presses a rag to the wound. Yet Tim says it needs stitches, despite claiming the bleeding has stopped.

Tim might be overstating Catwoman’s role here out of guilt for expressing disapproval of her when Bruce told him he had told her his identity, even though the argument was staged and that was never his real opinion. In that case, either Tim is actually the one who stopped (or at least slowed) the bleeding by the same technique, or else the wound doesn’t actually need stitches, save perhaps a couple of steri-strips to hold the edges closed if he moves his neck around and to avoid scarring.

Then we have the stabbing in the spleen:

Now of course we have just established that Tim does know what could be referred to as a Zen healing state, quite aside from the actual Zen healing he learnt in Paris at the start of his Robin career.

The trouble is, I suspect, that the spleen being a blood reservoir means that a major wound there will bleed a lot even if you do slow down your heart rate. And slowing your heart rate can only ever be a temporary measure in any case – it won’t actually heal the wound, just keep you alive until you get medical attention. But here Tim is out in the desert. No medical attention is going to come unless he makes his own way out, and I’m guessing doing a lot of activity is not compatible with keeping your heart rate low.

So I’m guessing that the fact that he regained consciousness at all was down to the possum reflex, but it didn’t work as well as normal because spleen, and then he had to bring his heart rate back up so that he could actually get up and drive himself and Pru back to civilisation.

Tim has a remarkable habit of claiming that what looks like a fairly serious injury has already stopped bleeding in comic panels (Tim's neck injury in Hush; falling and breaking Jason's memorial case in Batman and Son): have we considered whether Tim has some form of blood clotting disorder that means he stops bleeding faster than the average person?