The Wet Engine

One aspect of our heart journey that I've never grown tired of is learning about the heart. It's such an amazing, complex organ. I had never been intrigued with it before knowing our daughter's heart was broken. Now I want to learn everything about it and I'm mesmerized by it. It weighs eleven ounces. It feeds a vascular system that comprises sixty thousand miles of veins and arteries and capillaries. It beats a hundred thousand times a day. It shoves two thousand gallons of blood through the body every day. It begins when a fetus is three weeks old and a cluster of cells begins to pulse with the cadence of that particular person, a music and rhythm and pace that will endure a whole lifetime. No one knows why the cluster of cells begins to pulse at that time or with that beat. These cells undergo what is called spontaneous depolarization. Channels inside these cells begin to leak sodium and the wash of sodium sparks the trading of potassium and calcium back and forth which inspires an electrical current which augmented is the beat of your heart. These cells are infectious, as it were; if you put them alongside any other type of cell in the body, they make the other cells beat to their beat. ~an excerpt from chapter II, Heartchitecture

My favorite book. By far. (Thanks Barb.) I read it exactly two years ago, while still pregnant with little miss, and have since re-read it several times. It's written by a heart dad, Brian Doyle, about his son born with a complex CHD, and the surgeon who saved his son's life. Not only does he share the scientific side of the heart, but he explores the emotional, philosophical and spiritual side of the heart. It's moving and changed my perspective on having a baby born with CHD.