Why does air in the bloodstream trigger a heart attack or whatever it does?
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The blood system uses tiny capillary blood vessels to deliver the blood all the way to the cells. A lot of these are thin enough that normal cells can not even squeeze through them. If you get an air bubble in your blood stream then this air bubble might end up in one of these small capillary vessels and get stuck. If that happens then no blood can pass and the cells will not get as much nutrition.
How serious this is depends on where it is. The body does have a lot of redundancy and can handle quite a few different things going wrong. However if this happens in the heart or the brain it can cause quite a bit of damage.
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