So Valentine's Day usually brings visions of hearts, chocolate, roses, passion and 50 shades of whatever you want. Yesterday as I was listening to: SCIENCE FRIDAY --Tales of Broken hearts. I realized I would be remiss to not mention the marvels of THE HEART-our human hearts. After all, we wouldn't be here without them.
I made me more aware of my wonderful heart and respect the pioneers that have made advances in healing "broken hearts'. Did you realize that there are 60-100,000 miles of blood vessels in our bodies! Enough to travel the world 3-4 times.
But the story that really captured my interest was about doctor that did the first human cardiac catheterization in 1929 - - - on himself. He had begged his chief to let him do one, but was repeatedly refused. He persuaded the OR nurse
in charge of the sterile supplies to assist him. She
agreed, but only on the promise that he would do it on her rather than
on himself. However, he tricked her by restraining her to the
operating table and pretending to locally anesthetize and cut her arm
whilst actually doing it on himself. He threaded a catheter into his vein
threading it partly along before releasing nurse (who at this point realized the catheter was not in her arm) because he needed her help to get to the Xray department a couple floors below. On the way down, they bumped into one of his colleagues who tried to get the catheter out. . . . But finally they did get to x-ray and a fluoroscopy and his achievement was official! Whew!! And the rest is history. He did get a Nobel Prize 27 years later for his work.
I hope all of you are enjoying this Valentine's Day! I remember when my sister was little and my mom told her that she loved her. She said,"that makes my heart go piter-pat!"
May your heart keep going piter-pat. . . and you feel the love that wraps around and around us.
