The Normal Heart

The heart weighs between 7 and 15 ounces (a little bigger than a fist.)  The heart is a muscle that pumps blood through the body.  In fact, the heart beats 100,000 times a day, pumping 2,000 gallons of blood.  In a life time, a person's heart can beat more than 3.5 billion times.  Now that's a lot of work. 

The heart is more than just a muscle.  It has 4 chambers.  The upper chambers of the heart are called the left and right atrium.  The lower chambers are called the right and left ventricles.  Blood is pumped through all of these chambers, with the aid of heart valves.  These valves let blood flow in only one direction.

Your heart works very hard to pump blood to your organs, tissues, and cells.  Blood carries oxygen (air we breathe) and nutrients everywhere.  Blood also removes the waste products from our cells and takes it to the right place to be removed.  Our blood is carried through blood vessels back and forth from the heart.

Did you know: If all of the blood vessels in your body were laid out, they would extend to 60,000 miles.  In other words, our vessels would wrap around the earth more than twice.

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To better know what heart failure is, lets take a look at the normal heart and how it works.

For more information:

http://www.texasheartinstitute.org/anatomy2.html

http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=770