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FAQ

• Your heart is in the center of your chest. Your heart is not right under your skin but lies behind your breastbone, inside your rib cage, and between your lungs. The bottom of the heart is tipped to the left, so you feel more of your heart on the left side of your chest.
• The heart is about the size of your fist. (When you were a baby it was the size of your baby fist). The heart is a muscle, just like the other muscles in your body. It weighs about a pound, or less than half a kilogram.
• Your system of blood vessels – arteries, veins and capillaries – is over 60,000 miles (96,000 km) long. That’s long enough to go around the world more than twice!
• Blood is about 78 percent water. Blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate throughout the entire vascular system.
• The adult heart pumps approximately 2,000 gallons (7600 liters) of blood each day throughout the body.
• The heart’s rate when you are a baby is about 120 beats per minute. As you grow, your heart rate slows. A seven–year–old child’s heart beats about 90 times per minute. By the age of 18, the heart rate is about 70 beats per minute.
• The heart beats about 100,000 times each day. In a 70–year lifetime, the average human heart beats more than 2.5 billion (250 crore) times.
• During exercise, more oxygen and nutrients are needed by the muscles. Therefore, blood must be delivered faster than when the body is resting. To meet these demands, the heartbeat increases.

• The heart pumps blood in a one–way path around your body through blood vessels. The heart and the vessels are called the circulatory system. The heart valves stop blood from flowing the wrong way.

• The heart pumps blood in two directions. First it sends blood without any oxygen to the lungs to get oxygen. It then pumps the blood containing oxygen around all the other parts of the body. After delivering its oxygen, the blood returns to the heart to start the process of getting oxygen all over again.

During coronary artery bypass graft surgery, a surgeon takes a segment of a healthy blood vessel (an artery or vein) from another part of the body and uses it to create a detour or bypass around the blocked portion of the coronary artery. That process is called graft harvesting. Traditionally, vein harvesting is accomplished through a lengthy surgical incision in the leg (see Figure 7). But in recent times leading surgeons have been practicing a minimally invasive procedure called Endoscopic Vein Harvesting – EVH (see Figure 8). EVH requires one to three small incisions, each less than 1 inch in length. With this less invasive technique, the surgeon removes the vein with the aid of a special video camera, or endoscope.

The advantages of endoscopic vein harvesting go beyond faster recovery and avoiding a long leg scar. Patients undergoing EVH are less likely to experience events like wound complications, swelling, leg pain and infection. Obese persons, diabetics and patients suffering from peripheral vascular disease are at greater risk for leg wound complications.

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Know Your Heart