The Amazing Heart

I know I said I would continue with second heart attack which happened a month latter. But instead I'm going to try to delve into, the mystical and miraculous organ of organs, the heart.

In the last blog I told about the events leading up to and following the 1st heart attack.
Now I want to talk about what happened inside the heart that caused the attack.

I am no doctor so I'm talking in lay mans terms. As far as I was concerned the picture above is how my heart looked. I knew about cholesterol, and high blood pressure. But I pretty much assumed an attack would never happen to me. Silly on my part.


So on to the heart. I'm fairly ignorant so with the help of the Internet, Dr. Pascual, (my cardiologist) and my wife, I'll tell you as I understand it.

There are some organs in the body you can live without. I'm talking spleen, appendix, maybe a few others, but most of your organs are necessary for sustaining life. Liver, kidneys, brain, skin, intestines, stomach, lungs, heart.

All organs are alive and need nutrients and oxygen. In fact Every cell in your body needs oxygen. Every organ in your body is made up of cells. So somehow oxygen needs to get to the cells. How does this happen? Two organs do the trick, Heart and lungs.

I don't know which organ starts the process. It really doesn't matter to me. They're both necessary. But the heart is "THE" major organ.

In the first 4 weeks of fetal development the nervous system forms and then the circulatory system forms. Beginning with the heart.

In week 5 the first heart beat begins and continues until you meet your maker. Just think about how miraculous that is. In five weeks after conception your heart began beating. Blood is now pumping. All four heart chambers are functioning, insuring your body will receive all the nutrients it needs throughout life. It seems life does begin at conception.

I'm sure you're bored by now. But the heart, a muscle, beats over 100,000 times per day, pumping 2000 gallons of blood through a 60,000 mile network of vessels in the body.

Just as all the organs and cells in your body, the heart and lungs need one thing to survive. Oxygen. Deprive them of oxygen and grab your chest "Ethel it's the big one. I'm coming home"

So this muscle about the size of your fist not only supplies oxygen to every organ every cell. It also supplies oxygen to itself. Can you say perpetual motion.

I'm sure you educated medical types will think I'm simple minded, that there is a lot more to this. Like the electrical impulses that cause the heart muscle to open and contract, bringing in bad blood and sending out good blood. But that's beyond my comprehension. This is where my eyes glaze over and my head starts swimming. So lets keep it simple.

Since the heart needs oxygenated blood. It has it's own set of vessels that keep it alive. This is where the heart attack comes in.

My heart attack happened with the left side of the heart. As I said in the previous blog I had 100% blockage in the LAD which is the Left Anterior Descending. Pictured below.


If you follow the artery down you will see an artery branch off the LAD called the DIAG, diagonal branch. There I had 95% occlusion.

These are the main arteries that supply oxygen to the left side which helps make the heart open to receive oxygenated blood and then push that blood to the body. For most people this is part of the major artery that supplies blood to the heart.

Now for the widow maker. For several years, because of high cholesterol, platelets were forming clinging to the anterior walls of the two artery's. I felt nothing. I thought I was healthy. But something sinister was going on.

Little by little these tiny platelets unseen by the necked eye, were building and building. Then boom the one itsy bitsy platelet, was the straw that broke the camels back, so to speak.

This is where my heart attack occurred. LAD, Diag. The younger you are the more dangerous this particular attack is. The older you are the LAD forms more collaterals. Which pumps more blood to the left part of the heart. I did have collaterals formed, which is probably why I'm alive today.

In conclusion. I received 2 stents. And had little to none heart damage. Due to the fast work of EMT's of station one here in Tampa. My EF ejection fraction was 60 which is about as good as you can have.

When the left ventricle contracts, forcing blood out into the body, it's called "ejection" since it is "ejecting" the blood out into your arteries. Since the big pumper on the lower left is the one that pushes blood throughout your body, that is where they usually measure heart function - the left ventricle. That's the "ejection" part. The "fraction" part is because that pumping chamber (the left ventricle) never quite manages to pump out all the blood inside it - there's always a little bit left behind that lies around waiting for the next contraction. The amount your left ventricle does pump out per beat is called the "ejection fraction". It's X% (the amount pumped out) of the total amount of blood in the ventricle per heart beat.

Heart attack #2 in the next blog. And a comparison to President Clinton's attack.

Hope I haven't bored you

Rick O'Shea