Brushing up on my physiology

Not knowing that the trip to the hospital would turn out to be an 8 hour long ordeal, ending past midnight with a completely unexpected diagnosis (after all, the pediatrician had said that the heart murmur was probably nothing, she just wanted to be sure), Chris was originally going to stay home. It was good having him there in the hospital because he definitely has the more scientific mind. He immediately grasped the cardiologist's explanations (presented to us at 2 am), whereas I needed a drawing to be able to visualize what was going on. And even then, I had a hard time processing the information and relating what he had drawn to the pumping heart we'd seen on the echocardiogram screen. For over an hour we watched the expansion and contraction of Kai's heart. The opening and closing of the valves was mesmerizing, like a butterfly opening and closing its wings. Kai kept very quiet and was captivated by the images, eventually falling asleep. There was a strange hush in the room before the cardiologists finally explained what they had found. We heard what they said, but there was an immediate disconnect between hearing, understanding and feeling. Feeling happened later.

Here's an explanation of the image the cardiologist sketched for me above. The heart is a busy muscular organ, beating 100,000 times a day and pumping 5 quarts of blood every minute. It is a pump that takes in used, oxygen-poor blood, sends it to the lungs to get refreshed with oxygen, then pumps the re-oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. Without the heart, blood --and the oxygen and nutrients it delivers--would not flow.

The heart has four chambers (two on the right, two on the left) and four valves (which open and close with every heartbeat like gates). The heart's division between right and left sides protects oxygen-poor (blue) and oxygen-rich (red) blood from mixing. To understand the different terms and their functions, I broke down how the blood circulates from the body into the heart, to the lungs, back to the heart and then back to the rest of the body is a 10-step process:

1. Blood used by the body enters into the heart's upper right chamber (right atrium)

2. This blood gets pumped through the tricuspid valve

3. into the lower right chamber (right ventrical)

4. then is pumped through the pulmonary valve to the pulmonary arteries

5. which direct the blood into the right and left lungs. The blood gets oxygenated in the lungs and turns from blue to red.

6. The re-oxygenated blood flows back into the heart's upper left chamber (left atrium)

7. through the mitral valve

8. into the lower right chamber (left ventrical)

9. through the aortic valve to the aorta, the body's largest artery and central conduit from the heart to the body.

10. The aorta branches off several times: to the head and neck, the arms, the organs in the chest and abdomen, and to the legs.

Kai's heart defects exist in two places (#2 and #10). His tricuspid valve (the doorway separating the right upper and lower chambers) has two, instead of three leaflets. His aorta narrows before it branches off to the legs, thereby forcing the left ventrical to work harder to pump enough blood down to his legs.