I would have thought that an air bubble gets popped and we move on. That the gas eventually dissolves and gets passed somehow.
So, what’s going on? Why does the heart stop so violently? It acts like there was an implosion on the inside…
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Bubbles in your blood can’t just “pop”. That can happen to a bubble in air but that’s a whole different thing. In air you have a thin layer of liquid surrounding air. When the structure of that layer breaks anywhere it rapidly breaks everywhere. Bubbles in your blood are mostly liquid (blood) with some small gaps in them. There’s no layer to burst and there’s no where for the air to go.
It’s important to remember that the heart doesn’t pump blood continuously. It does so in cycles. That is, it alternately increases and increases the pressure on the blood. Valves make sure the pressure only goes in one direction.
The problem with air is that it compresses. Small air bubbles are fine and will eventually get reabsorbed into the blood. But if a bubble is big enough it will absorb the entire pressure cycle as compression. So the blood in the vessel beyond that bubble stops moving.
Whatever that blood vessel was feeding will stop functioning and eventually die. If that happens to the heart we call it a heart attack. If it happens to the brain we call it a stroke. If it happens somewhere else the tissue damage may not be so catastrophic.
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