So if a heart stops you can massage, pump or shock it back to life, and surgeons even stop a heart on purpose before firing it back up, so why can’t they do that 100 percent of the time? What is it that makes a heart stop and never come back? If the brain is working then surely the heart should always come back?
In: Biology
To quote my sons heart surgeon. “Hearts want to be pumping. Like really bad. It is harder to stop a heart than get it to start back up.”
When my son was born he had a 9mm hole between two ventricles in his heart. Meaning oxygenated blood was flowing back into the non-oxygenated blood, and circulating back through the lungs again. This occurs in 1/500 births…which is SHOCKINGLY common IMO. He lived with this for 6 months so he could put on some weight before the surgery. Anyway. They had to stop the little dudes heart and put a patch on the hole. The only thing they had to do to get the heart to start back up was start blood flow and a bit of electrolyte solution. It started pumping happily without issue.
A defibulator, the zappy zap zap machine with the paddles, that usually isn’t there to “restart” a heart. It is there to slap it back into proper rhythm. Imagine a car engine with mistimed cylinders. It can still run, but it is not doing a great job and will most likely damage itself soon. Same concept. The defib is there to pause the heart for a moment so it gets back into a good rhythm. Most defibs you find in public places will actually check first to see if the heart rhythm is improper and won’t fire unless it matches predetermined bad patterns.
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